Andrew Lih wrote:
Erik enunciates quite well the phenomenon you see in RfA. It's the
same that you see in U.S. politics -- a bunch of single issue litmus tests that wind up being the focus of the candidate. Some care most about WP:OFFICE, some about free content, some about notability, some about speedy deletion, some about biting newbies, some about blocking policy, etc.
The union of all these individual peeves creates an incredibly high bar for the nominee and winds up creating a search for "the perfect admin," when that's not what RfA is for. What winds up happening, is the poor sod up for adminship winds up having his/her RfA being the battleground for outstanding ideological spats within the community. That acerbic slugfest is not fair to the individual who happened to stroll into the situation. Long term, it's damaging to the morale of the project and folks who should be valuable to Wikipedia.
Each of the activities that you list yields a few enemies who then converge on the occasion of an RfA. This is more dangerous for a conscientious long term community participant than for a new person who has not yet had the opportunity to build enemies.
Ec