On 5/29/07, Gallagher Mark George <m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
My greatest concern for vandal-fighter admins is that
they can't be
judged by the usual (flawed, but once relatively accurate) metrics used
by the RfA Groupies. This is really two problems. First, we get admins
who look, walk, and quack like a duck but are in fact turkeys (the CVU
issue), and are nowhere near as mature as number of edits, name
recognition, etc. would imply. Accordingly, they're promoted to
adminship even though they aren't even close to Clueful enough to
succeed in the post.
Or, worse, they're so clueful it's their second or third admin account.
The second problem with the vandal-fighter admin thing
is that the
metrics get artificially inflated. "Okay, it's trivial to get 1500 edits
quickly, so we'll force you to get 3000 edits". Users with Clue but only
1000 edits may be passed over for lack of experience, but some
superdick newbie biter gets a free pass.
That's exactly right. It used to be more than enough to have 1,000
edits, so long as they were decent edits; now it's rarely enough, but
no one looks at quality. What quality is there to look at when you're
staring at thousands of vandalism reverts?
We know that the easy way to build up a sockpuppet account fast is to
do CVU and vote in AfDs. So what do we do? We promote vandal fighters
whose only project space edits are AfDs. I take the point that we
can't become paranoid, but complacency's no good either.
When people ask me now what they need to do to prepare for adminship,
I invariably have to tell them to do the vandalism thing, which they
shouldn't have to if they're mature candidates and good writers. Then
they risk not getting promoted because they blocked a vandal without
using the right tags ...