10-12% turnover voluntarily includes both people fired/asked to leave
and those who resign or seek new employment for their own reasons,
with somewhat of an overlap.
1% actually out and out fired is probably closer to accurate than 12%,
though a fair number of "asked to leave" might have been fired.
Wikipedia people aren't making their livelyhood off working here on a
volunteer basis - there's no life / support negative to walking away
or reducing activity.
As others have indicated, if we look at admins who go admin-idle (stop
or significantly reduce doing admin actions) or who leave the project
entirely, the numbers are higher.
We have 1004 active administrators, 283 semi-active admins, and 164
inactive. That seems consistent with having had 10-ish percent go
inactive each year.
On Dec 28, 2007 11:56 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote:
If anything, 1% implies that we should be looking for
more to
investigate. i cannot believe that just that small number is the total
size of the problem. No group of diverse voluntarily gathered people
can do quite that well.
On 12/28/07, Guettarda <guettarda(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Dec 27, 2007 2:27 PM, Risker
<risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
In the real world, organizations plan for a 10-12% turnover of management
staff every year; Wikipedia is well below that level.
But this isn't a matter of "management". Admins aren't management -
they
are editors who the community feels it can trust with a few extra tools.
And admin tools are - fundamentally - editing tools. It isn't fair to
separate voluntary from involuntary de-adminning - lots of people quit
because they realise they are about to be fired.
There are a few reasons to be voluntarily de-adminned. The only good reason
is because you no longer feel you need the tools - you aren't editing enough
to justify having them. That's a fair reason. More often, it's a way to
walk out in a huff, to throw a temper tantrum. It's just one more way to
slam the door and hope people notice. Understandable. In some cases it's
the hallmark of someone who wasn't well suited to being an admin in the
first place, but often it's a sign of problems that should concern the
community. Related to this is the "quit because of drama" kind of thing -
either because you were involved in controversy, or because you were the
source of controversy. As I mentioned before, there are the people quit
because they can read the tea leaves. Sometimes this is also
attention-seeking behaviour.
And then there are the people who give up the tools for none of these
reasons. Often these are people who seem admins as managers, who didn't
actually grasp the idea that adminship is an editing tool.
De-adminning isn't a very good metric for turnover. The number of admins
who enter the "semi-active" and "inactive" categories is a far
better
measure.
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l