G'day Gabe,

<many snips; please remove bits that are irrelevant to your reply, for the sake of those with slow connections, small screens, and sanity/>

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We know that the easy way to build up a sockpuppet account

fast is to

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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

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can't become paranoid, but complacency's no good either.

Because guess which group of people most need admin powers?

Geni has the right point here. Article-writers simply don't need the admin tools ass much. ~~~~

Geni is fond of playing Devil's Advocate[0]. When you find yourself agreeing with him all the time, it's a worry; I doubt that *he* agrees with all of what he says.

The point is not that those who clean up vandalism don't need the tools as much, or even that most of our admin pool should not be drawn from the vandal-fighter pool. A large measure of my own contributions to Wikipedia have been through vandalism cleanup. Cleaning up vandalism is an important task, and admin tools are a great boon to those of us who do work in this area.

There are two points to consider: 1) Cleaning up vandalism does not give you an understanding of Wikipedia. If you clean up vandalism for 90 days, you do not have the 90-day experience another editor would earn. Rather, you have 1 day's experience, repeated 90 times. Because admins have so much influence on all areas of Wikipedia, not just "don't replace [[Georgia (country)]] with the word 'poop'", they should *know* what they're talking about. And many cleanup admins don't. I call these people "CVU admins", but Geni doesn't like it when I do.

2) It's easy for someone out to harm the project to rack up a high score on the RfA voters' various metrics by doing vandalism cleanup, so if you wanted to sneak in a Trojan admin account, that's the way to do it. Heck, you don't even have to do a good job at vandalism cleanup --- biting newbies and tagging good articles for deletion and reverting good edits by accident looks just as good to an RfA voter as someone who knows how to clean up vandalism properly.

The most important thing for a good sporting official to understand is the Spirit of the Game. The most important thing for a Wikipedia administrator to understand is the Spirit of Wikipedia. You don't get that cleaning up vandalism (or, as CVU fans describe it, "whacking vandals"). You get that cleaning up vandalism and copyediting and writing articles and discussing protection and discussing deletion and co-ordinating article cleanup efforts and ... there's all sorts of avenues to becoming a good contributor, but you need to have walked more than one of them to be a good admin. At the moment, though, it's trivial to pass RfA even without anything remotely resembling Clue, and this not only provides us with poor admins, it also makes it possible for malicious users --- Trojan admins --- to gain access they shouldn't have.

As Steve Summit pointed out the other day, I don't have an answer for this problem. But there is a world of difference between saying we don't have an answer (as Steve did) and saying that there is no problem. There is.

[0] Not that there's anything wrong with that, or indeed with piss-taking of any sort. But I'd like to apologise anyway to those on IRC last night who genuinely believed I was one of the primary editors of Wikipedia back in 1979, laboriously reverting vandalism to the [[Jimmy Carter]] article with punchcards.