Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/31/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
Not really, though there probably is _some_ correlation. For example, edit summaries exist for explaining one's actions, something that is desirable for admins in general. People who assume that others will know why they did what they did without an explanation may often not make very good admins.
Sure, but the difference between 90% and 100% does not seem significant to me.
Agreed, definitely.
I'm not sure that your correlation there should be against time, rather than against edits (or better, articles edited). That is, waiting for 3000 edits improves odds over 1000 odds. But 3000 odds over a year rather than over 3 months does not seem to improve the odds that they have really demonstrated ability to avoid edit wars, does it?
There's probably correlation against both, but I'd personally consider time more important than edit count. Of course, that's time as an active contributor -- an abnormally low edit count may suggest long periods of nonparticipation, which should be discounted. Those edit frequency graphs are somewhat more useful here than just the totals, though nothing beats actually looking at the contribution history.
In any case, raw edit counts can be quickly and easily inflated. In fact, I could even argue that a low edit frequency _does_ suggest to some extent the ability to avoid edit wars, simply because edit wars themselves tend to inflate the edit count.
Also, having been around for a while without getting into trouble means one has had time to witness all sorts of "Wikipolitics" without getting dragged into edit wars and such, and also correlates negatively with the type of highly immediatist attitude that often makes one prone to hasty decisions, moral panics, edit/wheel wars, etc.
Fortunately few people do so, except as minimum criteria to filter out the most unlikely candiates, and in any case the fact that everyone uses different criteria tends to balance things out.
Except in my brief glance I saw a lot of "as per everyone else".
When a nomination is uncontroversial, the first dozen or so voters tend to say most of what needs to be said. After that most votes gradually become "per X above", simply because there's no point in restating what someone else already said better.
Random selection? Any admin that the would be admin can find to do the job? It would be an interesting step in the process - first you have to pass muster by an existing admin. It would also avoid people (like me) getting blown up by making a newbie mistake in the application process.
In case anyone misreads this, I'm suggesting that you have to find one admin to sponsor your application by reviewing your entire history. Not that one admin could singlehandedly block your application :)
So you're essentially proposing that candidates should only be nominated by someone who is already an admin, and that the nominating admin would be expected to carry out a background check on the nominee.
That sounds like a reasonable proposal to me, for what little my opinion counts. It's not as if anyone with the proverbial snowball's chance in hell of passing RfA couldn't find one _single_ admin to nominate them.