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Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in adminship discussions

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It is often said that "adminship is no big deal" and that the main criterion for adminship is whether a candidate can be trusted not to abuse the admin tools, bearing in mind that admin actions can be undone by another admin. A recurring issue on Requests for Adminship is that the participants in the process come upon a candidate they are unfamiliar with, and feel the need to decide whether or not they trust this person.

Since such a decision can be difficult to make about a person you don't know, these people sometimes decide upon a metric to judge people by, such as suggesting that the person must have been active for X months and have made Y edits. It is important to realize that all such metrics are arbitrary, and in effect really don't say particularly much about the candidate.

Editors who work with a certain process (e.g. WP:AFD) might decide that any admin candidate must be experienced with that process. However, note that a substantial number of existing admins do not in fact deal with that process. In other words, since that process isn't part of most admins' workload, knowing how to work that process should not actually be a prerequisite for adminship.