Tony Sidaway wrote:
Is that really true, though? How many editors do we have doing RC patrol? I'm on #wikipedia-en-vandalism right now and there are about a dozen voiced users (ie regulars) on channel. Most of them are idling. A load of other editors will be involved at any one time in fixing recent change, but if you look at the deletion log and see who is doing deletions and restores, you can get a maximum value for the number of editors who have been on active patrol today. 57 editors are responsible for the last 500 deletions--which covers the last 9 hours. But we have many thousands of editors contributing every day. For instance, of the last 500 edits, there were 287 unique usernames or IPs.
There may be many editors involved in dealing with vandalism, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the resources we have available.
The deletion log will only show admins who are carrying out the deletion. It won't show non-admins who are monitoring recent changes, manually reverting vandalism, and tagging speedies. It doesn't make sense to compare the number of admins performing deletetions to recent changes by everyone.
I also don't know how to interpret what the IRC numbers mean ... right now there are 32 people in #wikipedia-en, but I'm certain there are many more editors than that active right now.