User talk:Thorncrag/On RfA content-building
Fallacious
[edit]The "One part fallacy, one part hypocrisy" is itself fallacious, in being a huge pile of straw men. These do not actually reflect the views of people who require considerable content-building out of admin candidates.
The principal reason is that it's a gauge of WP:ENC versus WP:NOTHERE understanding. Too many (especially noob and young) candidates are after a position of authority on various social media sites, and treat WP like another one. It's "I've been on this channel for 6 months, you should make me an op", "I've been playing this MMORPG all year, I wanna be one of the wizards now", "I've been on this forum since 2014, shouldn't I be one of the moderators already?"
Secondly, potential admins who spend all their time at drama boards (or doing vandal-fighting and little else) and who do not work on content are unlikely to have an intuitive grasp of how frustrating content disputes are, including those between long-term, productive contributors. Consequently, non-content-editor admins have a tendency toward "Judge Dredd" and "banhammer" approaches to content disputes, and cost us valuable editors by penalizing them rather than helping them work past whatever the issue is. Most people who quit Wikipedia in anger do so after being questionably blocked or topic-banned.
Most of your points about how adminship differs from regular editing in many respects are correct, but no one was under any impression to the contrary of those points. It's just a completely tangential argument. Yes, admins needs to have a high tolerance for doing technical gruntwork. But they also need to be part of the content-editing community. By way of analogy, you expect your local police officers to be local, or at least to be citizens who share your community's overall values and culture. You'd be perturbed if mercenaries were imported from some foreign country to staff your local sheriff's department. It is not sufficient here that admin candidates have, but only have, a knack for admin work. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 01:37, 29 December 2017 (UTC)