User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Tips for becoming an admin/@comment-452-20121211025332/@comment-452-20121213055642

Definitely not negative! While at first I was apprehensive about giving a tool for possible edit-wars, no-one has abused having rollback rights; although it unfortunately hasn't resulted in any long-term contributors. Over the past year, I've given rollback to around a dozen users who've undone random vandalism, but not a single one is still active. :(

There are quite a few long-term editors who are active, but while those users are productive editors, I haven't seen a need to give them either rollback or admin rights. There's much less vandalism these days, so less of a chance for people to undo vandalism - but if any user requested admin rights in order to - I don't know, fix links in locked forum/talk pages or something - I'd give them admin rights.

I suppose I could "assume good faith" from everyone who requests admin rights and give it to them, but it seems like too much of a risk, if they're completely unknown users.