[Foundation-l] Hi, Jimmy Wales, Is there inspectors to investigate admins?

[Andrew Gray]

On 11/09/06, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not only is there not an en:wp admin mailing list, the lack of one
> speaks directly to what role admins play in en:wp. I believe both
> Dutch and German have mailing lists for sysops, where admins
> deliberate on decisions. At least in the case of de: the weight of all
> admins is behind the action of anything endorsed by consensus on that
> mailing list. This is quite a bit different than the "janitor" role
> that en:wp tries to keep admins to. (But even in en: it's certainly
> grown to be more than a janitor's role.)

As an idle footnote, I ran some numbers last night - en.wp has about
twice as many admins per article as the average among its peers
(average is 2500-3000 articles/admin, lowest in peer group is ~2000,
en.wp was something like 1300)

The reason this statistic is somewhat surprising is that when you
graph admin numbers against other factors (number of active users,
number of edits, etc)... then the admin-to-article ratio on en.wp is
the one that stays roughly constant, and you'd have expected it to be
comparable elsewhere. Interesting.

> I think it would be great to document community "norms" for each of
> the 10-15 largest Wikipedias just to get a feel for what best
> practices are out there.

There's a brief set of articles on en.wp about the largest individual
wikis... perhaps using these, and their other-language counterparts,
as the nucleus for something on meta would work?

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk