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@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@gmail.com wrote:
On Dec 27, 2007 2:27 PM, Risker risker.wp@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@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
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