User:Opabinia regalis/RfA criteria

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I've never liked the idea of having an "RfA criteria" subpage; it feels self-important. But I was asked to explain mine, and as long as I'm writing this out, I might as well post it in public. So here it is:

In the absence of extraordinary contributions elsewhere, admin candidates should have substantial experience in article writing and content creation.

• "Extraordinary contributions" will normally be in a technical area, not "I spend prodigious amounts of time playing whack-a-vandal." MediaWiki developers should be admins, if only because they already have higher levels of access and there's no reason to hamstring their development work unnecessarily. The other example that comes to mind is template experts. I can see leeway here for image specialists, for the pragmatic reason that so few admins want to deal with images and it's an area requiring specialized knowledge.
• As I mentioned in my own RfA, I like the idea of admins who specialize in a particular content area and keep a watchful eye out for sneaky vandalism, subtle POV-pushing, and other changes that might go undetected by an untrained eye.
• I admit a bias toward those whose content efforts are in a traditional academic discipline, particularly one that otherwise gets relatively little editing attention.
• I admit a bias against those who have copious numbers of trivial or botlike edits. This goes especially for the "a welcome template for every talk page" types.
• There is at least one user who, as of this post, I have already supported in the past and intend to "grandfather in".