Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/2/12 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
The ArbCom culls around 1% of the admin body annually
Is less than that, surely? 1% of the *active* admin body, maybe.
Ok, I've done the sums:
Special:Statistics says we have 1623 admins, 1% of that is 16. Wikipedia:Former_administrators shows 10 admins desysopped (involuntarily) total in the last year (to end of January), 7 by ArbCom, 2 of which were only for 6 months. I don't know what the average number of admins during that year was, but it looks like ArbCom permanently desysop less than 0.5% of the admin body annually.
Well, "active" admins are the only ones likely to be the subject of an Arbitration case, no? And that's said to be around 800. But in any case taking one year's numbers isn't particularly the right way to look at this issue. One good wheel-war ...
My gut feeling is that 99% of active admins are not a real problem, and that this is the right figure to hold onto in discussion. There are only two patterns I see for admins getting into serious trouble: those who have been about three months in the job, and turn out not to cope well as far as judgement goes; and those who really are resistant in the longer term to "admonishment".
That leaves random life-events as quite a significant contribution to those stats. I'd like to make the point that reconfirmation procedures are hardly a help with those - too blunt an instrument.
Charles