William Pietri wrote:
ikiroid wrote:
Perhaps it's the fact that we only really promote to adminship the workaholics or veterans who slipped through the cracks and we forgot to nominate, so we end up with a backlog of everything. There is a lot of pressure on admins and admin candidates to act perfectly, all of the time.
I confess that when somebody offered to nominate me for adminship, I declined. It was partly that I didn't feel quite up to the have-you-done-everything-a-lot filter in RfA voting, and partly because it looked like a major time commitment, with a lot of hair-pulling involved.
Next week will be the 5th anniversary of my participation in Wikipedia. I have declined adminship twice during that time. I have been a bureaucrat in Wiktionary and Wikisource, though I am not currently active in those two projects. Lately I have taken interest in a specific Wikibook for which last week I though it would be useful to seek adminship; so far I have two oppose votes and nothing else.
What I see in the RfA process is an attempt to draw people into tasks and issues that don't interest them at all. If I don't want to spend a lot of time vandal fighting or on RC patrol or arguing the fine points of policy why should I commit to that. For those of us who come here to develop information in an area of interest our work as admins will be an extension of that. As a consequence a good admin will deal with the problem people when they begin to affect his areas of interest. Who would want to spend time debating deletion requests about subjects in which he has neither interest nor knowledge.
If new admins are expected to spend their time grovelling about in the muck it's no wonder that they burn out so quickly.
I don't know if it's correct, but my impression was that ten hours a week was about a minimum to do it right. I felt like staying an editor let me keep the ability to put in time as schedule and stress level allow.
If you have only ten hours a week to contribute you may want to take a more focussed approach to your efforts, both as an editor and as an admin.
Now that I think about it, though, maybe I got that impression from watching the busy ones burn out.
Sounds like an excellent reason to avoid being an admin. :-)
Ec