Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in adminship discussions

This is an essay on the Requests for adminship. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Shortcut WP:AAAD

Reading time: approx. 14 mins. This is one of two important advice pages for RFA voters. The other one is Advice for RfA voters which is aimed mainly at new users, or users new to voting at RfA. It is strongly advised to read both.

This page in a nutshell: Users contribute to Wikipedia in different ways. Don't deny Wikipedia a valuable administrator simply because a user contributes in a different way than you do. Regardless of whether you support or oppose the candidate, be sure to also provide good reasons for your choice.

This is intended as a guide to getting the most out of the request for adminship (RfA) procedure. It is not intended to be binding policy, nor is there an expectation that editors who comment on RfAs should be familiar with it; it is, rather, to be an informative guide to useful participation in the forum.

The question posed with every RfA is "Can this user be trusted with the administrator tools?" Making a decision whether to trust an unfamiliar candidate is often difficult.

It is often said that "adminship is no big deal", bearing in mind that admin actions can be undone by another admin.

RfA is not a popularity contest, nor is it designed to force potential administrators to meet arbitrary criteria. It is not designed to judge whether a potential administrator holds the correct view on a controversial issue—which is different from asking whether they will apply a current policy consistently.

It is particularly helpful to give examples when commenting. The best way to do this is usually to link to the page or the diff showing the behaviour you are commenting on.

Comments in opposition to an RfA are usually subject to greater examination than comments in support of one. It is particularly helpful if comments are precise, give examples and/or diffs, and explain why the examples presented give rise to the conclusion that the user cannot be trusted with the administrator tools.

Criticisms should be constructive and polite. They should give the candidate an idea of what they should change in order that you could trust them. If the change could be made quickly and easily, consider proposing it to the candidate on their talk page and waiting for a response before commenting on the RfA.

If you oppose an RfA, your rationale may well be questioned or challenged. If possible, consider the points raised in response to your objection, and reply politely as to whether or not you stand by your initial rationale.

Activities off-wiki are not usually considered as part of an RfA—even if a candidate takes part in activities in real life or elsewhere on the internet which you find objectionable or highly admirable. Further, voters need to consider the OUTING policy before discussing off-wiki activities.

If a user's contributions to Wikipedia are constructive, many off-wiki issues are unimportant:

In extreme cases, or where it may provide useful information in addition to a comment based on the user's contributions to Wikipedia, off-wiki activities can be of interest.

If a comment in support or opposition relies on a user's support or opposition to a particular issue, it is particularly useful to make clear why this may affect their suitability to be an administrator.

A candidate may have a strong opinion on a topic but can be trusted not to abuse admin tools to further their philosophy. For example, many administrators with opinions which could be described as "inclusionist" or "deletionist" only make deletions in the most obvious and uncontroversial of cases, where reasonable editors are highly unlikely to disagree with their actions.

The question should be whether a candidate can be trusted not to let personal opinions lead to an action that is against consensus or policy.

If a user can't change something, it is almost never helpful to bring it into a discussion.

If you are tempted to leave a comment like this, consider whether you could leave a comment based solely on the merits of the user's activities on Wikipedia.

Of course, requiring that administrators be adults is a perennial proposal: In fact, "editors are free to use age as a personal rationale for opposing adminship on RfA".

Sometimes, a user has already expressed your exact thoughts on an RfA, and in these cases it's reasonable to state that you fully agree with them. On other occasions, you might find yourself in broad agreement with various points made, and in these instances, it's very useful if you state exactly which points you agree with (and any with which you disagree).

Votes that provide no rationale at all do not give constructive feedback to the candidate, nor do they contribute to the consensus-building process.

Conversely, providing a brief rationale allows you to explain your reasoning, carries more weight in the bureaucrat's consideration of the candidacy, and may even convince others to change their views on the candidate.

Users often gain useful experience as they rack up edits. Particular contributions, such as involvement with a WikiProject, participation in various processes such as FAC, AFD and RFA, or discussion on talk pages, can not only give the user experience which will prove useful as an administrator, but also enable you to determine whether they are likely to prove trustworthy with the tools.

At the top of the comments section of each RfA, it reads "If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review Special:Contributions/..." Snap decisions based on the number of edits, whether overall or in a particular namespace, work on featured articles or in discussions, without taking into account the quality of these and other contributions and their relevance to adminship are not helpful. If you are tempted to leave a comment along these lines, consider whether you can take the time to check out their edits.

Wikipedia benefits from having as many trustworthy administrators as possible. RfAs are intended to establish whether a particular user can be trusted with the tools, not whether they will use them to their maximum potential.

While it's great if administrators are active and use the tools they have, a contributor who uses the administrators' tools once a month still benefits the community. If a trustworthy person does not use the tools at all, there is absolutely no harm done. If they use them even once to good effect, then their adminship has served a purpose.

Editors who work with a certain process (e.g. AfD) may feel that any admin candidate must be experienced with that process. However, most editors focus on only a few types of contributions to Wikipedia, doing little or nothing in other areas, and for any given process, a substantial percentage of existing admins have no involvement with it. There are few, if any, processes, besides editing and interacting with other editors, that a potential admin absolutely must know.

Every editor was once a new editor who was struggling to figure out Wikipedia, and every editor made mistakes during that process. Many good editors and valuable admins have made significant errors or even been blocked at one time or another. Editors should generally place more emphasis on recent behavior and on the editor's response to their errors than on whether any error can possibly be found. Avoid undue emphasis on minor problems or errors made a very long time ago.

Arguments in RFAs should be made on the merit of the candidate alone, without even mentioning others, which could be construed as a personal attack.

RFA votes should never focus on "getting back" at the candidate for AFD-ing the article you started, opposing your proposal, or anything of the sort. Inversely, support votes should not be given as rewards.

While a given diff may actually have a good reason for supporting or opposing the nomination, it may not be self-evident to other users. In addition to the diff, you should give some explanation of why the diff shows that the user is good or bad for adminship.

Many excellent users are ready to take on administrator tasks, yet for whatever reason have not been nominated by another editor. If a candidate has demonstrated clearly that they have what it takes to be an administrator, then the sooner they become an administrator, the better for everyone. Thus, many people believe it is counter-productive to oppose a candidate based solely on the fact that the candidate is self-nominated. However, some users do not agree with this and hold a self-nomination to a higher standard than a non-self-nomination.

One of the more problematic "arguments to avoid" is the improper use of the number of edits (usually determined by looking at the results from an edit counter). Certainly an editor with only 100 edits is too inexperienced to be an administrator. But the negation argument—that a lot of edits is needed to really know Wikipedia (and that this is critical for adminship)—has two different problems:

• First, a very high number of edits isn't a guarantee of trustworthiness. There are editors with tens of thousands of edits who have been blocked multiple times, as evidenced by their block logs. There are also editors with many thousands of edits who have racked these numbers up by using semi-automated tools such as Huggle to revert vandalism and issue warnings, something that (while valuable) requires neither editing skills nor much interaction with users (Wikipedia vandals typically are of the hit-and-run type). Some edits, such as ones that use a script, can create multiple edits in a single mouse click. Similarly, it's possible to do huge numbers of edits in a matter of days (if one puts in the time) to post "welcome" messages to the thousands of people who register every day, with very little further interaction. On the other hand, some editors are the type who do not save every little change or two that they make to an article and only actually save their work on Wikipedia after completely finishing all of the work that they planned on doing to the article. Thus, the creation of a lengthy, new article or a major revision to an important article may take place in a single edit. In short, the quality of edits needs to be taken into account—a participant who does not consider an editor's contributions in detail should not simply support or oppose a candidate based on the edit count (too high or too low).
• Second, setting an arbitrary threshold—say, 3000 or 4000 or 5000 edits—as a "minimum" to demonstrate experience penalizes candidates (and discourages potential candidates) who spend significant time improving articles and creating new ones. Finding sources and exercising good editorial judgment takes time, and while Wikipedia needs vandal fighters and fixers of typos and editors who tag problems, the true value of Wikipedia comes from those who improve the encyclopedia by adding content and (where appropriate) new articles. It's difficult to validly judge the quality of a candidate by looking at disambiguation pages or double redirects that they have fixed; it's much easier if the candidate has been a significant contributor to articles (particularly controversial ones) where they have had to interact and explain and make a case for changes.

In short, an RFA participant who looks only at the total edit count may well get a wrong impression of the candidate's contributions. To say something meaningful about the candidate, it's important to look at the contributions themselves, not just their number or distribution (as discussed in the next section). And certainly a decision to support or oppose a candidate should never be based solely on edit count.

One final twist on editcountitis is concluding that the candidate is experienced enough but arguing against the candidate based on edits per month: that "this candidate doesn't contribute frequently enough". For all practical purposes, everyone editing Wikipedia is a volunteer; it's inappropriate to demand a certain level of contribution from anyone. If a candidate can benefit the project by using their admin tools for just 10 minutes a week, that's 10 minutes more of useful admin work that Wikipedia gets that it otherwise would not.

Different tasks generate different numbers of edits in different namespaces. Someone who spends a lot of time reverting vandalism or tagging unused non-free images will have a disproportionately high number of user talk edits because these actions, when properly done, include adding warning templates to user talk pages.

Sometimes a candidate receives opposition based on the balance of edits between the various namespaces. The extreme (and most problematic) of such arguments is that the candidate fails to have the appropriate balance—a desirable percentage in Wikipedia namespace (policy understanding), mainspace (article editing), user talk space (user interaction), and talk space (working constructively with other editors), for example. Sometimes this argument involves parts of namespace: AfD discussions, RfA discussions, etc.

There are at least three problems with this type of opposition:

• First, counts in a namespace can come from a variety of things: a high amount of Talk edits may be an indication of experience interacting with users, or simply semi-automated tagging for WikiProjects. A high number of User Talk postings may be dealing with problematic editors (a challenging matter to do well) or posting vandalism warnings to mostly anonymous IP talk pages (not so challenging, though still needed). Postings to Wikipedia and Wikipedia Talk pages may be helpful, or simply chattiness; RfA and AfD postings may be insightful or simply bandwagon postings.
• Second, a particular skill (interacting with other editors, for example) can be demonstrated in several different namespaces, including user talk pages, article talk pages, Wikipedia and Wikipedia talk pages. Similarly, the ability to understand policy (and make good arguments about it) can be demonstrated in a number of places, not all in the same namespace. In short, namespaces and skills are not the same, so failure to have many edits in a single namespace proves very little, if anything.
• Third, editors contribute to Wikipedia in many different ways. Helping with copyright problems with images is different than identifying problems with new articles, and both are different than helping mediate disputes among editors, yet all three are things that demonstrate valuable skills that are important to an administrator. Wikipedia administrators are not required to be good at everything; in fact, most administrators tend to focus on what interests them: they're not being paid, of course; why work on what is tedious or uninteresting?

It's appropriate to oppose a candidate who has done nothing in an area that may be considered basic: editing, working with other editors, or understanding something about Wikipedia policies and the Wikipedia community. But opposing a candidate simply because they do not contribute in the same way that a participant does, or in the way that an "ideal" candidate would, is counterproductive: it can deprive Wikipedia of a good administrator, forcing existing administrators to focus less on the administrative task they prefer to do and more on what they feel they have to do.

• Wikipedia:When not to link to WP:NOTNOW
• Wikipedia:Advice for RfA voters