User:Qwerfjkl/Why not all admins need to create content

This is a response to User:Ritchie333/Why admins should create content.

1. We are here to write an encyclopedia. Everything else, including adminship and indeed this essay, plays second fiddle. The average visitor goes to Wikipedia to look up some factual information, not read about who said what to whom on the dramaboards.

   It's true the main goal here is to write an encyclopedia. But the point of non-content work is to supplement that. (And the implication is that if you're not doing content work, you must be arguing on the dramaboards - c.f. e.g. handling CfDs (I'm writing this at the time of LaundryPizza03's RfA), creating redirects, etc.)

2. All good managers have some experience "in the field", even if ultimately their managerial role becomes greater. José Mourinho didn't become "the special one" because of his stint in the Portuguese Second Division, but it does give him some street cred with the players. If you don't know enough about things at the grass roots, those that do will give you a hard time. In the 1980s and 1990s at Microsoft, the typical management structure contained program managers, who would translate impenetrable gobbledegook into something more understandable, like English. The program managers didn't write code as part of their job, but they did need to know enough to get by for the developers to respect them and not laugh their heads off. The collapse of British Home Stores and its entry to administration has been (at least partly) blamed on high-level managers who had no experience in the business.

   Fair enough, but there are areas of administration that are not related to content work, so this doesn't seem universally applicable.

3. The GA and FA processes are formal assessments of quality, and a typical article needs significant work before a review can be passed successfully. Therefore, by improving an article to GA, of which the first criterion is "Well-written: the prose is clear and concise, it respects copyright laws, and the spelling and grammar are correct", it shows someone can write well. Communication is a vital skill for an administrator (particularly if you block somebody and they get upset) – another editor deciding you have a good ability to write and explain factual information, thus passing a GA review, gives everyone hard proof you have the ability to convey ideas appropriately.

   Communication is a good skill for an administrator, but I would be more convinced by a candidate who had shown that by actually communicating with others, rather than by one who writes clear articles, because the two are different skills.

4. Administrators are frequently called in to settle content disputes. You must settle these on the merits of the content, as that's what the reader cares about. In my experience, administrators who don't do much content work have a tendency to favour content disputes towards the editor who has been around the longest (especially if that editor is another administrator) as they aren't experienced enough to know the specifics. These are the administrators most likely to have custard pies flung at them elsewhere on websites that criticise Wikipedia. Nothing is better than winning an argument on technical merits when you could have lost it on political merits.

   I believe at least part of the RfA process is to judge whether you can trust the candidate to know when they should step back. If they can't judge that they don't know enough to make a good decision, chances are, they won't be a good admin regardless of their content work.

5. If you spend all your time on noticeboards, Arbcom cases, reverting vandalism or trying to spot it, you kind of stop seeing the wood for the trees. Step away from the areas of conflict and work on writing, and you'll discover things might not be as bad as you feared. If you can work on articles in collaboration as a team, it's great.

   See my comment at the end of 1.

6. As Wikipedia has matured, editors have left the project. Unfortunately, they don't necessarily get replaced by people of equal aptitude and experience, and medium-profile articles that are viewed quite a bit but not controversial enough to get regular editors, have a tendency to degrade over time. Administrators should spot where somebody is trying to reverse the trend, even when they may not know policy inside out. With a lack of content experience, you can't identify what these areas are.

   It's unclear to me what the administrator is going to do once they spot a user trying to reverse the trend. Give them a cookie? But then again, I'm neither an administrator nor a content editor, so maybe I'm proving Ritchie's point.

7. Related to the above, editors have left the project out of general weariness, but sometimes return to edit anonymously. When you've watched a few articles over time and examined who edits what, you can pick up on when an IP is making sensible edits. Without that, you might mistake them for vandalism, or otherwise leave a wake of automated messages which doesn't help improve the situation.

   If you can't tell if an edit is vandalism or not, you have bigger issues than lack of content work. And yes, probably doing content work makes it easier to tell what is vandalism and what is not. But by no means is it a prerequisite.

8. A central point in our civility and no personal attacks policies is "comment on the content, not the contributor". How can you do that if you don't know anything about the content? You might get accused of making a personal attack when you had no intention of doing so.

   I'm not sure how much content knowledge you need to determine if you're personally attacking someone. And I'm also not sure why anyone would comment on a situation when they don't know anything about it (though it's true, many do). But I would chalk problems arising from this down to poor judgement rather than lack of content work.

9. Stuck in a really nasty feud on WP:ANI? You need to step away and forget about it .... and what better way than bury yourself in some article writing?

   ... or clearing a backlog? Maybe creating redirects?

10. Copyright violations are really important business on Wikipedia, and as they are against the terms of use, admins need to vigorously enforce against them. Unlike vandalism, many copyvios are created in a civil manner by good faith editors, so they're harder to spot in a herd of recent changes. If you have read and written lots of articles, you get a "feel" for what a typical article looks like and what sort of language is (and isn't) used. This means you can identify when a new article or recent large change looks a bit "off" and suspect it as a copyvio.

    But many admins never touch copyright violations. Of course, for those that do, they should be familiar with content. But for those that don't?

11. Most RfAs have about 15 questions – the standard three plus a bunch of others that can be asked by anyone. The ability to answer questions thoughtfully with well-written English can mean the difference between passing and failing. A well-timed "Oppose per answer to Qx" can sink an RfA.

    See 3. But this somewhat circular reasoning. If they can't answer questions well at RfA, they might well fail the RfA. But opposing because they might answer a question poorly?