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I noticed we often copy/paste XTools results on RfA talk pages, so I wanted to advertise that you can now export the results as wikitext. For example, see xtools.wmflabs.org/ec/en.wikipedia.org/Jimbo_Wales?format=wikitext. More at WP:VPM (peramlink). Regards — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:14, 7 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks MusikAnimal! :) — sparklism ^hey! 07:05, 8 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Great job! Thanks a lot for adding this. Enterprisey (talk!) 21:24, 14 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I've been a regular voter at RfA for over a year now, and I remember very well the rush of new candidacies around Dec 2016/Jan 2017, which, when it proved to be just a blip on the radar, admittedly left me a little bored. However, one thing I have noticed over these past years of contributing to this project and to RfA discussions is that the candidates themselves aren't truly looked at past a superficial "I like him"/"I don't like him" basis other than a few key (although less meaningful than they are seen) metrics such as AfD participation, number of articles created, and above all, edit count. I have nothing against BU Rob13, and I have seen absolutely no incompetence thus far in his admin work, but his 2016 RfA passed due to a high edit count and high participation in those areas despite having only ten months of active editing, which contradicts what I have seen people say time and time again about one to two years being the bare minimum.

Time and time again, personal biases have gotten in the way of objective and impartial voting, as many others have been noting for years, and there seems to be a subtle sentiment against a completely unopposed RfA, with people like Andrew Davidson and their oppose du jour bringing up minor concerns for what seems to be the sole purpose of ruining the existing xxx-0 vote. Effectively, whenever we allow people to make decisions about other people, such as the RfA system in principle and in practice, it sooner or later devolves into nothing more than a popularity contest, as this seems to have already.

Let's get back to my point on edit count and other requirements. It used to be that a candidate could pass RfA just fine with a few months' experience and an edit count in the high triple figures, back when Wikipedia was in its infant and childhood stages, if you will. Since then, standards have been progressively inflating, to the point where it now seems that the de facto minimum edit count is somewhere in the 10-20K range. Someone who knows how to brown-nose effectively and who spends his entire day sitting there with Huggle open might amass 40,000 edits in six months, as I have seen people do in my years of vandal fighting, and he would likely pass RfA even despite knowing little about Wikipedia and how the delete, block, protect, and other buttons work other than simply how to click a button or two in Huggle and have the script do all of his work for him.

However, I don't think pressing buttons on automated tool sets really fast should be what we're trying to encourage. According to X!'s tools, I have made 2,273 edits in the past 365 days, and this is among the most active I've been. This is still over five edits per day on average, and my lifetime average is still an IMO respectable 3.2 edits per day. However, at the rate of 2,273 edits per year, it takes 6.6 years to reach 15,000 edits and have a chance of passing RfA. That means if an editor started at the age of 20, by the time he or she became eligible for adminship, he or she would now be 26 or 27, having gone from college kid to adult man or woman, holding down his or her own full-time job and likely married or even a parent. And it's not like I'm inactive or just a sporadic editor either; I often spend 30-60 minutes a day with the abuse log open in front of me, reverting any vandalism I find and giving talk-page warnings to the repeat or egregious offenders. The extremely high edit count de facto requirement is only encouraging people not to have a life outside of Wikipedia and just to sit there all day with Huggle open, as well as a likely player in the "kid with the tools" archetype, as I refer to it: the new or relatively new user who spends his time doing this, clicking buttons inside his automated tool set and reverting anything he thinks might be vandalism, without ever truly taking the time to figure out what he's even doing, let alone how Wikipedia actually works behind the scenes. Six months after he joins, he has already amassed somewhere in the ballpark of 50,000 edits in extreme cases, and already likely seems to be losing interest. This behavior is only encouraged by the current herd RfA mindset, and this "kid with the tools" archetype seems only to have emerged since about 2014 or 2015, becoming largely pervasive around 2017, with me noticing it especially so in the summer months of that year, when I was extremely active and my time online often overlapped with times when these users were on.

Personally, I also don't think it's necessary to have 67520 featured articles or 83134 AfD votes under one's belt either. Granted, it is very much a plus to have breadth of experience, which means contributing in many different areas instead of just sticking stubbornly to one particular topic. Besides, understanding and proper application of Wikipedia rules and policies is really what we are (or at least should be) assessing here, so it would only make sense to give preferential treatment to users with experience in many different areas, including but not limited to these. The mindset I have a problem with, however, is the one that basically states that those are the only worthwhile parts of Wikipedia. This is blatantly untrue; aside from content creation and deletion, there are many other aspects that are also necessary, including article maintenance (including gnome work), vandal fighting, and snuffing out sock puppets, bad usernames, and copyright violations. As such, it's not as much the raw number of articles created, or AfD votes cast, et cetera, as the actual quality of such. Creating unreferenced, potentially libelous stub articles that read in their entirety "John Q. Public (born 31 December 1969) is a terrible guy, he has spent 23 of his 48 years alive in jail for assaults" is not helping anyone, and as such, just creating 150 of those articles should actually be seen as a negative as they are more disruptive to the project than they are constructive. Creating one long, well referenced, well written, accurate, and overall very good article is, however, very much a net positive, even if it is just one (which, in the eyes of many RfA voters), is nowhere near enough. Similarly, voting "delete" on every new AfD that comes out without giving explanation as to why is not helping anybody; a few well-composed AfD votes with policy-supported reasoning should be worth a lot more than just writing the eleven characters needed to spell "delete ~~~~" on every new AfD submission.

Sorry if this is overly long or incoherent; this is just one man's opinions on this process. 65HCA7 23:10, 23 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

First off, you seem to assume that adminship is a coveted privilege, rather than a necessary chore. Second, the de facto standard today is "two years of being a non-controversial member of the community", and none of your straw-men would pass that bar. power~enwiki (π, ν) 23:37, 23 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

And yes, Rob and GoldenRing are exceptions. You'll have to ask people who were there at the time why. power~enwiki (π, ν) 23:57, 23 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This "analysis" is shallow to the point of being absurd, and frankly insulting to the vast majority of regular RfA participants. ansh666 00:21, 24 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

On second thought, is it allowed for me to withdraw my comments, as it's clear I'm just going to get flamed? I'm not meaning to upset anybody here. 65HCA7 01:06, 24 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]