[WikiEN-l] We need a policy against vote-stacking

[Steve Bennett]

On 5/9/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> Then he ran for RfA.  He was opposed on many counts, including general
> immaturity, low-level creepiness, having an huge edits-per-article
> average (because of his obsession with Article X), and having a really
> annoying way of using talkpages (coloured text and a big .sig).  He
> attempted to argue that, since he was a "Wikipedian in good standing",
> because he had the minimum cited edit count at the time, we owed him
> adminship.  He even complained to Jimbo about it.
>
>
> As long as we persist in expecting admins to have the support of the
> community, there should be a way for us to have input on candidates who
> may meet all the requirements but who nevertheless should not be allowed
> to ever touch those extra buttons.

Every time I explain my idea, I do it badly :) When I say, "we check
that the candidate meets all the requirements", I don't imply that
those requirements are simply numerical. I would hope they would
include things like "little evidence of incivility", "no edit warring
in 2 months preceding nomination", "little evidence of treating
Wikipedia as MySpace" etc. I would hope for a healthy debate over what
we expect from an admin. Rather than a debate over every individual
candidate who runs, rehashing the same arguments again and again.

In exactly the same way, rather than fighting on every single AfD
whether all schools are notable, for instance, have the debate once
and for all (to be fair, I think the "centralized discussion" place
tries to do this?), then simply apply the rules.

Certain requirements will require intelligent human interpretation to
see whether a given article subject/admin candidate meets them. But
I'd much rather see "meets criteria 1,3,4 but I can't find a source to
see that the article meets criteria 2", rather than "nn, delete ~~~~".

Steve