On 10/21/06, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
I was not being asked for a reason to do anything. I was being asked for a reason for being able to do anything, which is quite different. I made it clear in my nomination that I wished to be judged on the strength of my earlier contributions. And in those earlier contributions, I made quite sure to give reasons. (Mathbot's tool says: "Edit summary usage for Earle_Martin: 100% for major edits and 96% for minor edits. Based on the last 150 major and 131 minor edits in the article namespace.")
As an admin you don't get to chose which questions people expect you to answer (which can range from "why did you delete my image??????" to "which guideline says we should not have article specific disclaimers?" to "have you stopped blocking people against policy?").
(incidentally "because I wanted to destroy something beautiful" "who cares?" and "I've just blocked you. Draw your own conclusions" are not good answers.)
Is that somehow harmful to the project?
yes because it means that we have 500 people who can cause rather a lot of chaos who are not really part of the admin community.
And why would I want to be in any particular percentile of activity? This is a reference project, not a game where you have to rack up a score. (See: editcountitis.)
Admins are meant to be cleaners. Standards of what makes a good admin will differ from what makes a good editor.
Perhaps, if you (a) have many, many hours to spend on editing Wikipedia (I don't, being both employed and having a family to look after) or (b) you use AutoWikiBrowser. I don't, because strangely enough to use AWB you have to qualify by having a large number of edits.
No I just know exactly in which areas it is possible to rack up edits at a rate of greater than one a minute (stub sorting, orphaning images on CSD, cating uncat articles and wikifying are the first lot that come to mind).
Care to explain?
Politics gets complicated. It gets really complicated when the players are wikipedians and the rules are fluid and change from minute to minute. You can dodge the politics but that takes a fair bit of knowledge of what is going on.
Care to explain?
Comments are aimed at other editors. Neutral votes are aimed at bureaucrats.
Sorry, but making oblique references to events I did not witness involving a person I've never spoken to is a remarkably useless way to answer a point.
It is however an excellent demonstration. Unless you know about the events behind that comment people will appear to be acting irrationally where in fact they are not doing so. The "I promise not to go batshit" is meaningless unless you know what people consider to be going ah "batshit".