On 5/9/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@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