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Administrators regular Wikipedians who have access to maintenance tools The most commonly used of them are page protects, deletions, blocking. Promoted following a Requests for adminship and in general only editors who have made active contributions to wikipedia are succesfully promoted.
Although there are various standards that are applied when making a recomendation on an editor's promotion, contributions to article space is usually a prerequisite. However, once promoted many administrators find that their contributions to articles decreases, and in some cases stops. There are limitations on time, and many "janitorial" tasks are heavily backlogged.
While the creation and refinement of articles is the stated aim of Misplaced Pages, the sometimes invisible support work that adminstrators perform is also important.
Administrators are not only here to build the encyclopedia
Administrators exist in order to maintain the integrity of the encyclopedia as well as act as editors, but their administrator privileges are used mainly for areas outside of the article namespace.
Deletion
Deletion is the fundamental opposite of building the encyclopedia. Instead, deletion is a process to improve the quality of the encyclopedia by removing articles that are not suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia. It also removes unnecessary pages, such as unused categories.
Protection
Protection is a tool to assist pages that are undergoing tendentious editing, disputes, or excessive acts of vandalism. Protection does not move an article forward - it effectively puts it at a standstill. It is used to maintain the integrity of an article, though administrators must always protect the m:The wrong version.
Blocking
Blocking can stop users who are a) not contributing to the encyclopedia, b) blatantly damaging the encyclopedia, c) damaging the community. Once again, blocking is not a tool to add to articles, but it maintains their integrity (or maintains the integrity of the community).
Ignore all rules
Rules provide a starting point. Ignore all rules provides corollaries that can follow from the rules. There are stated rules and then there are implied rules that are acted upon based on IAR.
3rr
The three revert rule is a prime example of an opportunity to use WP:IAR. If an editor reverts an article three times every 24 hours, but never 4 times in 24 hours, they cannot be blocked per the three revert rule policy. They can do this for months and nothing can be done. Instead, the 3RR is ignored to maintain the integrity of the encyclopedia and the user is blocked.
Rules such as blocking for 3rr should be ignored if one's edits are clearly tendentious compared to the other. However, this is a very risky matter that is often not followed as such, which is where some controversy of IAR lies. It is far less controversial to not block someone based on IAR than it is to block someone.
Disruption
Disruption has an amorphous definition that can be construed to fit the need of a blocking administrator. While this of course has been and can be abused, it is also necessary for blocking users who are damaging to the community. IAR spawned the ability to block for disruption, as we cannot define a certain action as 'disruption', but it can only be interpreted as such.
Then what do administrators do?
Article namespace
Administrators are editors with simply more buttons, and being an administrator is really no big deal. But their extra buttons are not often used for creating and adding to articles. Upon gaining adminship, administrators have a high tendency to focus more on the wikipedia and template, category namespaces, etc. Asking administrators to solely work on the article namespace would be like simply taking away their tools.
This is not to say administrators are more important than editors without the tools, however. Administrators simply have the ability to work in the other namespaces that regular editors cannot deal with, which will naturally cause people to believe there is a divide between administrators and regular users (which there is, of course - it can't be helped).
There are still areas in the article namespace that requre administrator intervention, such as page move requests, however, so there are indeed areas here that require administrators. There is much more to administrators, however, which means that candidates for adminship should be judged based more on just their article contributions.
Misplaced Pages namespace
Administrators who mainly deal in the Misplaced Pages namespace are the true janitors. They do the dirty work that others do not recognize, without whom the encyclopedia would become backlogged in more places than it is already. If an administrator can be trusted and has shown desire to assist in this area (by showing experience already, perhaps), they are a major help to the project.
Community
Administrators can also deal with user issues and disputes. These administrators often have to make the choice of protection or blocking in content disputes, and whether blocking is the best option in user disputes.
Does it matter?
Administrators are expected to make mistakes - it is assumed they will show poor judgement early on with their user rights. If an administrator is a trusted enough user that they can learn from these, they can only do more good than harm to the encyclopedia. Some may help more than others, but what matters is that they assist in some way.