On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 7:34 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Are you saying that a _declining_ number of administrators means a _growth_ in bureaucracy? It would normally mean the opposite, either a loss of control, or that the ordinary members were taking the function upon themselves. What I see is a greater degree of control and uniformity, not driven by those in formal positions of authority.
If you assume that administrators are identical to the bureaucracy or some non-shrinking proportion thereof, then that does look like a falsehood.
If you assume that administrators reflect rather the number of committed long-term contributors, and their numbers wax and wane pretty independently of the need for administrators, then that makes sense. Little kills enthusiasm and participation as surely as bureaucracy. Why are so few even trying for adminship?
(I remember being VP of a taekwondo club in college; I decided to get us a locker for our gear, which we had club funds for. The paperwork and circumlocutions nearly destroyed my merely college-student enthusiasm, and made me seriously consider purchasing the damn locker myself. This would've been possible because in meatspace, there are no bots, scripts or policy wonks who would've noticed the sudden appearance of a locker and objected.)
Indeed, aside from cutting off the branch we're sitting on, bureaucracy diminishes the need for admins. Admins, at their best, embody the old benevolent dictator or {{sofixit}} or IAR spirit - not mechanically applying guidelines and deleting or not deleting, but judging based on all factors. Bureaucracies on the other hand, seek ever more automation and de-humanizing of the process. Consider WP:PROD. I used to clear out PRODs myself, and I know that some admins who did similar work took the PROD process as a reason not to think - if the PROD has been unchallenged for several days, then it must be deleted. There were good reasons to not be mechanical; some articles were vandalized and then prodded, or deliberately edited down, or were reasonable articles. But there you have it anyway.
You only need 1 admin to delete a few dozen or hundred PRODs; even fewer, if the occasional suggestions for admin bots go through. You need many more admins to read through a few hundred AfDs and ponder the right decision.
If the increasing bureaucracy idea is right, we should expect our contributor base to shrink and especially to see fewer edits by new users survive.
This is the case.
New articles are down significantly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia#Wikipedia_growth
Edits and new users are down, and reverts are up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/Log_analysis
Felipe Ortege's thesis mentions:
“In the first place, we note the remarkable difference between the English and the German language versions. The first one presents one of the worst survival curves in this series, along with the Portuguese Wikipedia, whereas the German version shows the best results until approximately 800 days. From that point on, the Japanese language version is the best one. In fact, the German, French, Japanese and Polish Wikipedias exhibits some of the best survival curves in the set, and only the English version clearly deviates from this general trend. The most probable explanation for this difference, taking into account that we are considering only logged authors in this analysis, is that the English Wikipedia receives too contributions from too many casual users, who never come back again after performing just a few revisions.”
(The last sentence could as well be summarized: people are trying en, and not coming back.)
And it's not like there isn't a lot to write about. (See eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwiki_and_specialize... )
Some of these statistics are old. But I don't know of any newer more optimistic data.