[WikiEN-l] for years been promoting admins who go with the flow rather than challenge low level bad behavior by admins and long standing users

I've got a couple of concerns with the adminship thread above. Firstly the idea that new generations of admins have come in and somehow supplanted the old guard. I've been an editor for a little over three years and an admin for a year and quarter, by either measure I'm easily in the newest 10% of admins. Whilst our editing cadre and I suspect the nonadmin part of the ANI crowd will contain a large proportion of editors who've edited for less time than I have, the vast majority of our admins predate the RFA drought that began in early 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_by_month I agree that we have a problem if admins willing to take on problematic vested contributors are in short supply. But I would contend that if this is the case it is more a matter of such admins having been removed from the admin cadre than their presence being diluted by new admins. I suspect that I'm not the only newish admin who takes a cautious approach when wielding the mop in unfamiliar or contentious areas, but as most admin work is uncontentious grunt work ideally suited to new admins, it shouldn't be a problem if thats what our few new admins mostly do. I think that the <1% most difficult blocks are best left to more experienced admins. Secondly Fred Bauder's idea that "a successful candidate must never have taken a stand. This for a job that requires taking stands." I discussed RFA at Wikimania with a DE editor and a very longstanding EN veteran. From the German editor I learned that the requirements on DE Wiki are more inflated than our own, with 10,000 edits now the de facto minimum for a serious RFA candidate. The EN veteran told me that he used to check a candidate's entire contributions before !voting, but he abandoned the RFA process when 2,000 edits became the norm, as it took too long to check that many contributions. Judging from my experiences of RFA; whilst successful candidates with less than 12 months tenure and 3,500 edits are very rare, so too are opposes based on diffs older than 6 months, except where it leaves an easy trace such as a blocklog, a former RFA or "excessive use of tools", as some editors will oppose based on the percentage of automated edits rather than a lack of manual edits. If you've been reasonably active in the subsequent months then stands taken over a year ago are unlikely to be mentioned, and one of RFA's few redeeming features is that almost anything can be treated as a learning experience if you can demonstrate that your recent edits show improved behaviour. However a recently taken controversial stand is high risk, even if a majority agree with you it only needs a 30% minority to blackball a candidate. Based on my observations of recent RFAs, recency of diffs quoted in RFAs, speed of the early votes in RFAs, the number of pageviews of various pages in my userspace when I ran at RFA and the emphasis in RFAs on questions and statistics rather than diffs and behaviour; I believe that whilst the number of candidates who meet the defacto criteria for a serious RFA run is quite limited, frankly disclosed past controversial stances and actions are usually considered time expired after at most 12 months. Undisclosed old incidents that didn't merit a block are rarely discovered; So either they don't happen or more likely no-one spots them. -- WereSpielChequers