Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 20:50:53 +0000 From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On 25 March 2010 20:45, Kwan Ting Chan ktc@ktchan.info wrote:
Well, they're not dwindling since admin rights don't get
taken away on
inactivity. ;-) But to the general question, because the
standard expected
of a candidate for RfA has gone up over the years?
And because going through a continuously ratcheted-up gauntlet is rather too demeaning for people to consider worth the effort?
- d.
As one of the newest admins on enwiki, I must say that I was lucky in that I didn't have a contentious RfA, however, I think that over the last few months, I am the exception rather than the rule.
Despite the oft-quoted "It's no big deal", obviously many of the editors commenting at RfA *do* consider it to be a big deal. I'm not sure why this should be - although I notice that it's more likely-than-not to be non-admins who are the most vehement opposers.
OK, I may be a newbie admin, but I agree that it's not that big a deal - my admin actions have been to delete obvious CSDs, close xfDs according to the census - plus a very few protections/blocks/rights changes... Nothing that's a big deal - very much maintenance, as it is meant to be.
As for the number of active admins - well, people move on from things online. I remember when I started online, lots of my friends would be in Messenger, or in the chat rooms - now hardly any of them are. This is mainly because they have more family commitments than they did (mumbles) years ago. The same is true for admins - family commitments crop up, work commitments - or they get bored of the abuse they get (I've been lucky so far, I've not received abuse for my actions so far - that's not asking anyone here to abuse me, by the way!)
Has anyone compared the activity rate of admins over time to that of non-admins? For example, what %age of admins whose accounts were created in 2006 are active, compared to the %age of non-admins whose accounts were created in 2006?
Is this an admin-only problem, or is it an editors-in-general problem?
Phantomsteve
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