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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On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 10:54 PM, Phantomsteve wikipedia@phantom-enterprises.co.uk wrote:
<snip>
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?
Probably not (though it would be good to be proved wrong!).
People sometimes forget how big Wikipedia is. It is difficult to know exactly what is going if people don't do the boring number crunching and statistical analysis. I thought that at some point various WMF people were tasked with doing this, and there are various automated statistics, but to get meaningful answers to these questions will require someone to actual extract the data and analyse it. It is possible that the task is so daunting that only bits and pieces have been looked at.
There are certainly enough suggestions here and on-wiki to keep several people busy a while, so it would be good to organise that both to make sure the analysis does get done, and to avoid duplication of effort or wasted analysis.
For an idea of what is out there, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_statistics
Trouble is, that doesn't really do more than scratch the surface.
Carcharoth