G'day Steve,
On 4/1/06, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Does the riot act say "team A is right", or does it say "I don't care who's right, play nicely please"?
The latter. No personal attacks, for example. It is a different matter when an admin says this, compared to people going on about ad hominem in a pot-kettle situation.
Right, so having gotten an article to featured article status is not necessarily a useful training ground for being an admin? In the same way that being a great soccer player is not necessarily an advantage in being a great referee, or being a great pianist is not particularly useful in being a piano tuner...
It is not necessary to have been a good player to become a good referee; or, indeed, to have played at all. However, it helps ... oh, crikey, does it help! The more experience you can get with the game (in my experience this applies to every game I've played or officiated), the easier it is to officiate that game. In a sporting context, being a player yourself helps you understand what the players require from an official, what things are trivial[0], what things are dangerous and tend to upset players and need to be stamped on, and so on. It is possible to learn these things, but it takes time, and while you're busy trying to work out what's expected of you your reputation suffers.
On Wikipedia this manifests itself differently. Those of us of a "process is descriptive, not prescriptive" bent like to see admins who have a handle on the way Wikipedia works, who can be trusted to do what seems best for the project (as opposed to just doing what policy says or, worse, just doing what they feel like). The more experience in the different areas of Wikipedia one has, the better an admin they'll make.
RC patrol and stub-sorting produces awe-inspiring edit counts, but doesn't really provide any real insight to how Wikipedia works. Now, an admin who becomes an admin solely on the strength of his vandal-fighting abilities is fine, so long as he restricts himself to vandal-fighting ... and doesn't run off to speedy delete stuff that doesn't need deleting, or close AfDs with "x% said delete/keep", or unblock patently offensive usernames because "you need a better summary than 'username'", or semi-protect pages because one vandal added 'poop' to the lede, or apply indefinite range blocks, or ...
There are plenty of things a good editor might find useful about adminship, and plenty of reasons why a good vandal-fighter might not be a good admin. Remember the CVU newbie syndrome from a while back? "I don't have a fucking clue about Wikipedia, but I'm good at whacking newbies, so I should have admin tools!"
The more experience you get, the greater an understanding of the project your receive, and (theoretically), the better an admin you are. This applies to all aspects of the project, whether you're stub-sorting, RC patrolling, newpages patrolling, on the welcome committee, mediating, working on the cleanup backlog, fixing typos, crafting FAs, or even just simply editing for fun once in a while. Administrator is a Wikipedia-wide rĂ´le, and not just the preserve of one aspect of the project.
[0] Some levels of football expect to be allowed to get away with a certain degree of holding, pushing, etc. Some levels of softball expect some latitude with leaving the base early, pitching, etc. Some levels of netball expect you to go easy on the stepping, contact, etc. And so on ... knowing which level expects what, and how much to allow and how much to come down hard, is vital to the game. Be too strict, and you can kill the game. Be too laid-back, and the players will take advantage of you.