Fred wrote: Charles wrote: I'm just coming back from a weekend spent fighting a cold and avoiding WP entirely (don't use the admin bit with a 4-deg-F fever). Pacing onesself indeed. Firstly, thanks to Newyorkbrad for starting the thread. I wanted to comment on both Fred's and Charles' comments, and indirectly on some others in-thread. I've gotten in a bit of trouble for having gotten confrontational with a couple of admins who burned out, in the few days before they blew. I don't think I was a major or precipitating factor, but from one viewpoint I didn't help. In both cases, I saw little alarm bells going off in my head and was pretty sure they were about to go. I've seen those several times since and started leaning on people to take breaks. In my viewpoint, there's an inherent problem with admins reaching the endstate of burnout. One common pattern is that they completely lose good faith regarding someone they've been arguing with for a while and hit them with an admin tool grossly abusively, or start seriously assuming bad faith for newbies. This is not garden-variety admin mistake - I see those all the time. This is not grumpy admin syndrome - There are less of those, but they "feel" different than the ones I'm talking about who blew up. This is not admin having a bad day. The ones who blew up and left made a very sharp, escalating level of nastyness (doubling period 12-24 hrs) and then lost it. It's possible to see this as finally pushed too far by a troll. But I think that's as a rule a mistake - the two where I pushed back, the provocations had been garden-variety, IMHO, and the reactions out of proportion. One of the advantages of continuing to AGF even with the abusers is that the admins about to blow up stand out clearly. As I said, the last couple of times that I saw the signs, I asked people to wikibreak, and they did. In one case they left and didn't come back, in the other they returned with decreased participation. My motivations for pushing in the earlier cases were that we do sometimes have a legit problem with admin-BITE, and I was seeing it there. We do need to stay aware and vigilant on that point. Admins will make mistakes, have bad days, turn grumpy, burn out in a big blowup, and on rare (unique?) occasion turn seriously rogue. I have noticed that I've both made mistakes and had bad days. If we intend to keep encouraging and attracting new talent, we need to minimize the consequences and volume of BITEs. I don't pretend to have the single right answer, but I think that pushing people to take a break de-escalates situations and has ancedotally led to less loss to the project (with a totally useless statistical sample size). If you see someone suddenly become very much more confrontational or angry or aggressive, I advise trying to get them to take a break. It might also make sense to create some sort of structure for an organized effort on that account. Anything from a "Stressed admin noticeboard" to a "This admin pledges to take a Wikibreak if 5 admins or 10 users ask them to in any 24 hr period" pledge and template. Those ideas occurred to me but I haven't had bandwidth to follow them up. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com