User:Clovermoss/RfA criteria

I have participated in numerous RfAs, so I might as well write down what I think about when I vote in one. I consider RfA to be a community wide discussion about a person's suitability for adminship and I'm fine if anyone presents a counter-argument to my voting rationales. I perceive adminship as just maintenance work, but it's maintenance work that requires a combination of people skills and extensive knowledge of policy. I try to have reasonable expectations and I will almost always support if I think of you as a net positive.

Here are some other things I think about:

• Civility: it's one of the five pillars, so please don't bite the newbies, or the regulars. Incivility is pretty much a dealbreaker for me.
• Trust. Can I trust you not to do something like delete the main page? If you do do something like delete the main page, do I trust that you will you do your best to fix it and be accountable? I'm okay with mistakes in the past, as no one is perfect, but I do care about sincere apologies and not repetitively making the same mistakes. I might find some past mistakes as more of a red flag compared to others.
• Knowledge of policy. There are many ways this can be demonstrated: answers to RFA questions, helping at the help desk/Teahouse, UAA, CCI, NPP, AfC, AfD, creating/improving articles, etc. If you're generally trustworthy and knowledgeable, I'm incredibly likely to support. I'm generally willing to be lenient and see someone learn with the mop than be required to know how to do everything beforehand.

Regardless of the outcome, I appreciate the intentions of anyone who is willing to take on administrative responsibilities. I realize that RfA is an incredibly sensitive environment and I do not take my participation in the process lightly. If I oppose an RfA, I'm willing to consider changing my mind in the future.

Editcountitis

Edit count is often used as a metric in RfAs. I once noticed an !oppose vote that stated 20,000 edits was the de facto minimum for an RfA candidate nowadays. It is common for Wikipedians to state that edit counts do not reflect the value of any given editor's contributions. However, I do think that sometimes editors with higher edit counts forget what that can actually mean in practice. Therefore, I wish more people would consider:

• We're all outliers – Out of the millions of registered accounts, there's roughly 5,000 editors who make 100 edits every month and roughly 500 who make more than 1,000 edits a month. If we are evaluating RfA candidates based purely on edit count, the first group of editors would need to make 100+ edits a month with no breaks for 200 months (16.6 years). The second group of editors, if they kept their same pace of editing consistent, would only need 20 months (slightly less than 2 years).
• If someone in the first group took an average of 15 minutes to make an edit (e.g. reading comments on a talk page before writing a quick reply, adding a citation to a previously uncited sentence in an article, etc) and they made 100 edits a month, they would be dedicating 25 hours of their time every month to Wikipedia. If their edits took an average of 30 minutes, they would be dedicating an average of 50 hours of their time every month to Wikipedia. Over the 16 years it would take for them to meet de facto RfA edit count standards, they would have spent somewhere between 4,800 – 9,600 hours editing Wikipedia.
• Most people have lives outside of Wikipedia and can only dedicate so much of their time here. Personally, I work full time and sleep on a regular basis. I also have other responsibilities in my day to day life. Wikipedia isn't my only hobby, even if it's where I focus most of my attention. Realistically, there is only so much time the average person has to volunteer as a Wikipedian. People have varying experiences that can affect this too. For example, women generally have less leisure time than men.

My experience with RfA

This section is a work in progress so please don't take it as all I have to say on the matter.
Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Clovermoss – my RfA
When I finally decided to run for adminship in December 2023, I had a history of denying people who asked me about this very path. I said no to 8 different people (some of which approached me on-wiki and others who had approached me off-wiki). My refusals became more complicated as these inquiries kept coming. There were a lot of factors that caused my hesitation. Initially, I was actually quite open to the idea, although I did not feel I was ready. My thoughts went something like this:

Sure, I have been here since 2018. I have mostly been an active editor apart from a year wikibreak I took in the midst of the pandemic. I have never really been in any serious confrontational debates that possible voters would see as dealbreakers and ensure at least a few opposes. But does all this mean I'd be a good admin? No.

The first serious attempt to convince me to consider adminship came here. I admit that being incorrectly called Clevermoss did not help my confidence because I felt like someone who really knew whether I was ready for adminship or not would know my username. (Sorry Barkeep49, I'm sure it was a harmless error on your part.) However, this experience definitely did not remove the doubt that I may look like a decent candidate on paper but if someone looked deeper and was more familiar with me they would not see the same thing. I knew, intimately, what I had and had not accomplished as an editor on this website. I rarely participated in admin lite tasks. I felt like my content contributions were mediocre at best. I felt like no matter how much I tried... I was simply never good enough at anything. I still struggle with some of these thoughts. One potential nominator expressed that they thought I was struggling from impostor syndrome. They expressed the sentiment that others really did think highly of me despite my personal doubts.

Enter a new age where I was slightly warming up to the idea. I still did not feel ready but I felt more comfortable with telling myself maybe someday. Then two RfAs came along that caused the doubts to come rushing back in. These RfAs were ScottishFinnishRadish's and MB's. The former introduced the concept that people might take my early competence as a red flag in itself. Some opposes in that RfA make vague accusations about possible socking on SFR's part, simply because they did things that newbies supposedly are not capable of doing. Other opposes mentioned that they didn't think SFR was experienced enough. I felt like there was a very real chance that I could go through something similar. I viewed my earliest contributions in a new light. I was now someone that others could view with inherent suspicion. This caused some inner turmoil because Wikipedia is an incredibly important place for me. It's a place where I feel like I belong even if I do not always feel like I deserve this sense of belonging. I did not want to lose that magical feeling and I felt that experiencing such an RfA could change that. This is when I started to experience literal nightmares about what it would be like to run at RfA. MB's RfA also solidified some of my previous doubts. Here was someone I considered to be so much more experienced than me and they failed. What chance did I have?

So I decided on a more definitive level that adminship was not for me. There was simply too much to lose and for what? The possible benefits did not outweigh the risks. Around this time, I also made some strides in becoming slightly more confident. Maybe constantly saying no to people about adminship was good practice for saying "no, I disagree" more generally. I think my hesistation to avoid conflict (which most people seem to think of as a positive trait) stems from some social conditioning that makes this sort of thing way more difficult than it might be for someone who grew up in an environment that was more tolerant of dissent. Anyways, around this time, I became more comfortable standing up for myself and not just saying quiet when I encountered situations that bothered me.