User:Beyond My Ken/RfA criteria

[Under construction]

Barring unusual or extraordinary circumstances, I will normally:

• Oppose editors without sufficient experience, regardless of the quality of their edits.

• Oppose any nominee who does not show by the quality of their edits and their edit count breakdown a strong familiarity with content building, the most important aspect of editing Wikipedia, and vital to the quality and reputation of the encyclopedia. It is extremely important that admins understand the problems of content-oriented editors, so that when there arise conflicts with non-content editors, they know what content editors have to deal with. Admin candidates can get this understanding by, for instance, creating non-stub articles, greatly expanding articles, taking a badly written or structured article and revamping it into a good, informative, well-written article and other similar tasks. Gnomish work such as typo-fixing, copyediting and sourcing is important as well, but it's not going to give the nominee a sense of what content editors need to be protected from harassment and MOS-hardliners.

• Oppose editors who express strong political biases (in any direction) which I feel they may not be able to overlook in their admin work. Everyone has opinions, and sometimes it's hard not to express them on talk pages, so simply being liberal or conservative is beside the point, it's the editor who frequently makes editorial decisions based on their belief that "Wikipedia has a left-wing bias" or that "there's a right-wing cabal in this country" who are the problem. Some admins I admire for their balance and fairness appear to hold opinions that are antithetical to my own, so it's not impossible to be fair while still holding strong opinions, but I will not vote to give the bit to editors who allow their political beliefs to influence their content work.

• Oppose nominees who self-nominate. Anyone with the social skills and Wikipedia experience required to be an admin will certainly be able to find a reputable editor to nominate them for admin. Editors who are nominated by recently created admins will also be oppposed.

• Oppose, in general, until there is some way to keep them under control that does not yet exist, I oppose giving the admin bit to bot operators who, as "super editors", already have a significant degree of power.

• Support editors I am very familiar with who have done yeoman's work at improving the encyclopedia, especially in the area of content-building.

• Support nominees who are supported by numerous editors whose judgment I respect, subject to the above objections.

• Note: The argument that Wikipedia is in dire need of more admins is not convincing to me, and plays no part in my decisions. Similarly, the number of the nominee's GAs and FAs and DYKs and the "correct" AfD voting percentage of the nominee are of no concern to me. As stated above, I reserve the right to tailor my vote to specific circumstances: these are not hard-and-fast "rules", but guidelines in helping me reach a decision.

As of January 11, 2017