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I do not believe in using arbitrary criteria such as 'must have made 15,000 edits' or 'the majority of their edits must be in mainspace' to form my opinion in requests for adminship. I have what first seems a very low bar for adminship, but for many prospective candidates that bar can be hard to attain. Most hat-collectors will not pass these criteria, because they can be clueless and they do not have the attitude required to be a good sysop. Here are my most important criteria:
Has content contributionsdoes not mean much. Being the primary contributor of a solid B-class article with no real faults would allow a candidate to pass this requirement. This can often be circumvented when the candidate has high levels of experience and is participating in an area which is set far apart from content, such as AIV.
Is a solid contributor in the areas they want to work atis the most important part of experience.
Solidis the key word here. That means a very good understanding of policies and guidelines in that area, including where the rules do not say the full story and the existence of widely followed yet unwritten rules. It also means large amounts of participation in those areas.
General understanding of how Wikipedia worksis extremely vague but it basically means that a clear understanding of the five pillars, the deletion process, what will get you and other editors blocked, and discussion principles such as NPA, BRD, and RfCs. The vast majority of this should be demonstrated, unless it is far-fetched from the editor's sysopping areas.
General understanding of how Wikipedia works) but they do cover slightly different areas.
The first attribute is knowing the basics of Wikipediais mainly about the candidate knowing their way around the many administrative areas and when they uncover new areas knowing what to do; reading and understanding the rules and/or process guidelines, and more whatnot.[a] Knowing the intricacies of every area is far from what I expect but most candidates should know the basics of the majority of areas. Obscure areas like sockpuppet investigations I do not expect an administrative candidate to know anything about unless they actually want to work in that area.
The second attribute is that lack of common sense needs to not be demonstratedis the best wording I can muster but still very cryptic. The basic premise behind this is that common sense is very hard to be demonstrated for a candidate, but the opposite is generally a no-no if it is recent.[b] Following on with the aforementioned hypothetical situation, through a skimthrough of recent discussions in a newly visited area a prospective candidate should be able to infer or find out how those rules are implemented.[c]
Almost all significant, recent incidents should fall under these criteria.
These are additional criteria; I like to see these, but they do not matter too much and will rarely affect my !vote:
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