Kelly Martin wrote:
A substantial fraction of our admins are largely worthless at writing articles. In fact, there's a good argument for the position that people who can write articles should not be admins: we need them writing articles, not running around breaking up fights.
At the moment, even granting that viewpoint, adminship is still pretty useful just for editing. I can't count how many times it would have been a real pain in the ass if I hadn't been able to do things like delete a redirect to make way for a move, not to mention needing admin rights to edit things like [[Wikipedia:In_the_news]] in the first place.
-Mark