Alphax wrote:

Once upon a time (certainly in late 2004) it was pretty much a "requirement" for admin candidates to "have" a Featured Article.

That was more of a hobby-horse being ridden by one or two voters. Idiosyncratic adminship criteria get alternately criticized and ignored, and usually go away eventually.

Then someone decided that editcountitis was a much better metric, so people started using that.

Editcountitis has been around much longer than that, although it wasn't as big an issue for the adminship process in the beginning. Even so, people have used edit counts as a metric for admin candidates for a very long time, in Wikipedia terms. Since the software makes it relatively easy, the phenomenon is sort of inevitable.

The problem is partly that the expectations of edit-counters are constantly inflating. As their expectations increase, so does the amount of work required in counting, and they demand additional tools to make the process as easy as it once was. You might think it would occur to them that the fault lies with their inflated criteria, but no.

Curing editcountitis is not the only solution to the flaws in the adminship process, of course. But it's an important element in considering candidates based on their qualifications, instead of resorting to unthinking substitutes for real evaluation.

--Michael Snow