[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins

[George Herbert]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 1:24 PM, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers at googlemail.com> wrote:
> The number of admins on the English Wikipedia may possibly have
> peaked, and the number of active admins is 20% down on its peak of a
> couple of years ago.
>
> Dec 2009, Jan 2010 and February 2010 had only 19 successful RFAs
> between them, with December and January both equalling the previous
> all time low of 6. March 2010 is not yet over, but with less than 7
> days left and no-one running, it looks like 2 is a new record monthly
> low for RFA, and 15 a new record low for a quarter.
>
> Those who are becoming admins are mostly the tale end of the classes
> of 2006/7, as we currently have only 34 admins who started editing in
> 2008, and only 4 from the class of 2009.
>
> Are other projects experiencing a similar phenomena?
>
> What are the likely results of a dwindling number of admins, and a
> growing wikigeneration gap between admins and other editors?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_by_month
>
> Regards
>
> WereSpielChequers

Thanks for bringing the data up here.  I hadn't noticed the trend this year yet.

Fundamental question 1 - Do we have enough admins?  Fewer may not be a
problem, or it may be a huge problem.

Fundamental question 2 - How long are admins from each set elected
staying active?  We've had a total of 1841 promotions, of which 870
are still active.  I'd almost like to go through each admin's history,
from account creation to adminship to end of active adminship (even
better, month by month edit and admin activities) to see how long
we're keeping people.

This isn't hard statistics, but I don't know where all the source data
is to try and do the data reduction on it...  Ideas, or info sources?


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com