Wikipedia:Vetting process

To widen our pool of prospective good candidates, to raise the quality or our candidates, increase the chance for Requests for Adminship (RfAs) to pass, prevent the RfA process from being quite so toxic, and give some of our most prolific editors some honest feedback, experienced editors are invited to propose possible candidates for “vetting”. This is an informal process that is by no means a pre-requisite for a successful RfA.

Steps

 * 1) An experienced editor – the proposer – who thinks another editor – the prospect – might be a good candidate, notifies the prospect of the intention of listing the prospect here.
 * 2) Prospect agrees on the prospect's talk page. This agreement does not mean any commitment that prospect will run as a candidate.
 * 3) Proposer posts the name here.
 * 4) Other editors reply to the proposer privately by e-mail, especially if they believe the prospect would not be a good candidate, or if they want to co-nominate the prospect.
 * 5) Proposer evaluates the replies, and if the feedback looks good, then:
 * 6) Proposer asks the prospect if he or she wants to run as a candidate for adminship
 * 7) Proposer officially nominates the prospect
 * 8) If the feedback identifies a problem, then the proposer can discuss it with the prospect, and help  become a better candidate. When the proposer thinks the prospect has improved appropriately, they can relist the prospect, mentioning that the earlier concern has been addressed.

List of prospects
Please fill in the fields of the table as appropriate. Proposers should add a link to “ Special:EmailUser/proposername ” to make it easy for others to provide feedback. For “Status”, enter “proposed”. Once the proposer feels the prospect has had enough feedback, “proposed” can be changed to either “nominated” or “withdrawn”, as the case may be. If an entry has been in the list for 4 weeks, then any editor can change the status to “expired”. Anyone can email a review, and it would be helpful if the first 3 people to do this would list their names under “Reviewed by”.

Some advice on how to take feedback
Prospects: caveat emptor, which is Latin for “you don't have to buy what the reviewers are selling” (literally, buyer beware). Feel free to check your reviewer's past RFA votes and rationales here ... if their comments were often out of synch with what was going on in those RFAs, then they may not be good at guessing how the votes will go, even if they have good advice otherwise. Take negative feedback especially to heart, because to succeed in an RfA you need to have about three support votes for every oppose vote. Also, when you receive confidential negative feedback, assume good faith and remember that most normal people don't enjoy giving negative feedback for its own sake and likely only do so to help you improve.