On 11/11/06, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:

For the last week I've had an MfD open for an egregious example of process gone wrong. It'd be good to get some comments on it from list-members.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:Req...

I think the biggest problems faced by those pages are that they are too unweildy and too many of the opinions are out of date and undated.

I don't see how this can be considered "process gone wrong" or "instruction creep". The underlying idea is good. I remember when I first came across adminship. It seemed like a cool idea. Then I read that people with "less than 500-1000 edits" were unlikely to pass the vote. Since I had just a few hundred edits I wandered off and learned about policy and all sorts of other things, and ended up passing my RFA easily. In part it was because of the standards publicised by jguk - he said (at the time) that he would oppose anyone without an FA to their name, and support a candidate with one. Putting a good article together did not, in and of itself, prepare me for adminship, but the time it took gave me a chance to learn about policy and learn about Wikipedia.

Anyone who has even had an "oppose" vote with little explanation wishes for a list of standards. Some people have said that criteria belong in a person's user space. If so, then there needs to be a central directory of these userspace criteria - so something like this list would be needed anyway. People who do post criteria should be required to update them, or at least certify them, every few months, but that's a different matter...