[WikiEN-l] Analysis of Request for Adminship

[Steve Bennett]

On 3/31/06, Ilmari Karonen <lists at vyznev.net> wrote:
> When a nomination is uncontroversial, the first dozen or so voters tend
> to say most of what needs to be said.  After that most votes gradually
> become "per X above", simply because there's no point in restating what
> someone else already said better.

Except that it demonstrates that they really have thought about what
they're voting on, and aren't just being a sheep ;)

> So you're essentially proposing that candidates should only be nominated
> by someone who is already an admin, and that the nominating admin would
> be expected to carry out a background check on the nominee.

Yep, but to clarify, the "background check" is not a pass/fail, it's a
short report summarising all of the user's contributions (perhaps
month by month?), whether good or bad. To give any debate over the
user a bit of a starting point. Perhaps it could look something like
this:

March 2006: Two semi-edit wars on [[Spock]] and [[Star Trek]], accused
of violating NPOV. Large number of apparently helpful contributions on
[[Brian Peppers]] and [[Moldova]].
:Yes, I saw this edit war on [[Spock]], he behaved like a total prat.
[[User:PeanutGallery1]]...
April 2006:No contributions, except for deleting the word
"anti-semite" from 6 articles.

Steve