On 05/28/2010 08:31 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
We may still have enough admins to do the urgent admin tasks for quite some time to come; But I can see us becoming more dependant on the occasional admin who can clear a 100 article backlog at CSD in an hour or two, and I fear a growing divide between admins and others.
Has anybody looked at the details of the admin experience around particular tasks?
In debugging the user side of sites, I often look at things in game design terms: How easy is X to accomplish? How rewarding is success? How punishing is failure? What's the ratio of success to failure? Does it provide lasting challenge, or does it become boring? If the action becomes rote, is there a higher-level goal or reward?
From the stats I've seen, my hypothesis would be that doing admin tasks just isn't much fun, so it wears people down over time. You get an initial burst of activity because somebody has leveled up and is trying out their new powers. And then people stick with it out of a love for Wikipedia, or an attachment to keeping something polished. But eventually day-to-day grind of the work overcome that and people drop out, or stick with it out of duty but become crankier.
But that's just a guess. It'd be great to see some serious user research on the admin experience.
William