Joshua Brady wrote:
We are putting way too much on an admin pool, where only a small group handle 60% of the load. We all need to remember, adminship is *NOT* a big deal. You are not and should not be defined by your edit count. Everyone is quick too jump on prospective admins, without examining it all, and getting to know how someone will handle things. Without requiring 5,000 edits (Which yes, is not hard to obtain.). Now this doesn't mean there are occasions where something needs to be WP:SNOW'ed away.
Yeah, I was pretty astounded at how RfA worked when I went there after a long period of not looking at it. I became an admin back in mid-2003 sometime, after being active on the project for about 6 months, with maybe 400 or 500 edits. I didn't have to answer some 20-question-long interview, and nobody really pored over my edit history with a fine-toothed comb. If I had to go through some bureaucratic process, I would probably tell the process-wonk asking me to answer some questionnaire where he could stick it.
I had been around for six months, seemed to know what was going on and hand't done anything stupid, and so of course I was given adminship upon request. Why don't we do that now? It's still not hard to take back adminship if someone badly misuses it, so IMO all RfA candidates should get adminship by default, with the burden of proof being upon anyone who thinks they should be denied it to argue why. More concretely, any unexplained "no" votes should not be counted.
-Mark