On 5/29/07, Gallagher Mark George m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
My greatest concern for vandal-fighter admins is that they can't be judged by the usual (flawed, but once relatively accurate) metrics used by the RfA Groupies. This is really two problems. First, we get admins who look, walk, and quack like a duck but are in fact turkeys (the CVU issue), and are nowhere near as mature as number of edits, name recognition, etc. would imply. Accordingly, they're promoted to adminship even though they aren't even close to Clueful enough to succeed in the post.
Or, worse, they're so clueful it's their second or third admin account.
The second problem with the vandal-fighter admin thing is that the metrics get artificially inflated. "Okay, it's trivial to get 1500 edits quickly, so we'll force you to get 3000 edits". Users with Clue but only 1000 edits may be passed over for lack of experience, but some superdick newbie biter gets a free pass.
That's exactly right. It used to be more than enough to have 1,000 edits, so long as they were decent edits; now it's rarely enough, but no one looks at quality. What quality is there to look at when you're staring at thousands of vandalism reverts?
We know that the easy way to build up a sockpuppet account fast is to do CVU and vote in AfDs. So what do we do? We promote vandal fighters whose only project space edits are AfDs. I take the point that we can't become paranoid, but complacency's no good either.
When people ask me now what they need to do to prepare for adminship, I invariably have to tell them to do the vandalism thing, which they shouldn't have to if they're mature candidates and good writers. Then they risk not getting promoted because they blocked a vandal without using the right tags ...