G'day SV,
There's also the issue of sockpuppet admin accounts being used in support of that person's other accounts by blocking opponents, protecting on the right version, and so on. The problem for us is that we have no idea of the scale of it. Does it happen at all? Rarely? A
Cabalism becomes much more worrisome when we face a "Cabal" with only one real person!
lot? We have no information. What I've noticed is that vandalism fighting is becoming an increasing issue at RfAs, and it has seemed to me (based only on my sporadic visits to RfA) that more and more people are being promoted on the basis of lots of minor edits, which is not a good thing for a number of reasons, the sock admin issue being one of them.
My greatest concern for vandal-fighter admins is that they can't be judged by the usual (flawed, but once relatively accurate) metrics used by the RfA Groupies. This is really two problems. First, we get admins who look, walk, and quack like a duck but are in fact turkeys (the CVU issue), and are nowhere near as mature as number of edits, name recognition, etc. would imply. Accordingly, they're promoted to adminship even though they aren't even close to Clueful enough to succeed in the post. This is a problem I've banged on about for a while, so I won't blame anybody if their eyes glazed over for this paragraph.
The second problem with the vandal-fighter admin thing is that the metrics get artificially inflated. "Okay, it's trivial to get 1500 edits quickly, so we'll force you to get 3000 edits". Users with Clue but only 1000 edits may be passed over for lack of experience, but some superdick newbie biter gets a free pass.
Cheers,