User:Tisane/Characteristics desirable in an admin

Of the many characteristics desirable in an admin, here are some that I view as particularly important.

Knowledge

An admin should know his way around the Wikipedia namespace. He should have a good working knowledge of policies and guidelines, as demonstrated by the correct application of them in his edits. In particular, he should have a good understanding of, and the ability to properly apply, criteria for speedy deletion, since such decisions are made without much opportunity for community input.

Communication skills

Because effective communication is key to resolution of difficult situations, an admin should be reasonably well-spoken. His communication with other users should be characterized by completeness, conciseness, consideration, concreteness, clarity, courtesy, and correctness. An admin should be able to stay cool when the editing gets hot. Any user will, at some point or another, find himself on the opposite side of the consensus of users. The ability to fight and lose a battle gracefully and graciously tells a lot more about the user's tendencies than how he wins. It's relatively easy to keep your composure when you're on the winning side. (Although some users have trouble winning graciously too.) We all have our own ways of dealing with the frustrations of Wikipedia; personally, I write userspace essays to express my feelings on various subjects.

An admin should have tact. A user who feeds the trolls by successfully letting them egg him on will find them doing so even more when he becomes an admin with responsibilities for dealing with troublesome users. A user should be in the habit of killing disruptive users with kindness, a technique that experience shows works well. This does not mean letting people get away with whatever they want. It just means avoiding being rude or wounding their pride needlessly, which throws unnecessary gasoline on the fire. Often even a disruptive user has a partially valid point, and many disruptive users have made valuable contributions and possess potential to reform. A diplomatic user may wish to acknowledge this in certain situations, to ease the blow of a warning or a block.

Note that being well-spoken does not necessarily require that users actually communicate a lot via talk pages. Sometimes a user's diplomacy and good judgment are demonstrated as much by what he doesn't say as by what he says. Also, some users prefer the laconic bold, revert, bold, revert, bold method of editing as a means of avoiding spending too much unnecessary time on talk page discussions, which aren't always necessary for article improvement.

Good judgment

Good judgment is essential to avoid taking ill-advised actions that will cause major problems. It is something gained through knowledge and experience, because the wiki community has different values, norms and expectations than many other online and real-world communities. There are many situations in which a user may know that a certain action is in the best interests of the project. Nonetheless, he should refrain from doing it if he knows that the consensus will be against it. This can seem counterintuitive at first, but it is an important principle for a user, and especially an admin, to abide by. (The rule of obeying consensus does not apply to a wiki god-king, who has the authority and responsibility to shape the wiki's purpose, nature and culture in ways that will benefit the project, even if others object.)

Experience

An admin candidate's recent account history should reasonably consistently reflect the aforementioned characteristics of knowledge, communication skills, and good judgment. This does not necessarily require a large number of edits or a chronologically lengthy account history. But a certain amount of account history is needed to clearly demonstrate that, if this is a user who wrecked his reputation under a previous account, he has changed his ways.