Gallagher Mark George wrote:
To be fair, it's not exactly poor judgment from admins --- well, it is, but not entirely. In my experience dealing with speedies, the vast majority of improper speedies are articles that some CVUer incorrectly tagged and the admin just speedied without looking, trusting the CVUer's judgment. Where an admin commits an improper speedy off his own bat, it's usually something along the lines of he judged that he didn't need to follow process in this case. Incompetence vs IAR, in other words.
I usually do a fair bit of research before speedying anything. Google it, look at the page history, etc. I delete far more than I remove tags -- in fact I rarely remove tags, unless the cited CSD clearly doesn't apply.
Why? Because sometimes I half-agree with the tag, but don't think that the cited CSD is fully met by the article. Maybe in spirit but not in letter. So I just leave the article as it is, hoping another admin can come to a decision.
The fact is that C:CSD is full of BS pretty much all the time. Any admin will tell you that clearing out CSD is pretty much hell. For some reason this is not the case with WP:AIV. There's usually a small backlog there, but it's a lot more fun to clean up, probably because there are fewer entries. But I digress.
The fact is that admins clearing C:CSD are going to be more willing to push the button than remove the tag, because, well, pushing the button is less effort, and I would speculate (with no evidence at all) that the majority of CSD patrollers are deletionist, myself included. I like to think that I have a clue, but sometimes I can't bring myself to push the button or remove the tag. I know it's drivel but we don't have a CSD for drivel that looks like it might make a shred of sense.
And that's why when I do look at C:CSD I stay there for about five minutes, then wonder what the hell I'm doing since I get more work done at RC patrol or watching AIV.
Many admins told me before my self-nom that admin work was mostly thankless grunt work. In my limited experience, C:CSD is exactly what they were referring to. You spend hours there to get almost nothing done, then get pissed on by both the authors and taggers of the articles you touched.
Some admins may be reckless, but the majority are trying to sort the wheat from the chaff and make the occasional slip-up. The more articles an admin deals with in this context the more mistakes he or she will make. I'm not saying they should be given a free pass, but a little respect for all the BS they have to put up with wouldn't hurt.