[WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 80, Issue 25

[WereSpielChequers]

>
> Message: 9
> Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:45:20 -0700
> From: George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <38a7bf7c1003251345o244feebbreafd2cc705e1cd15 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> 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
>
870 was the number of active admins as of the end of 2009, it has
since dropped to 842 today.

I think the total number of admins active and inactive peaked at 1720
and is now 1718, but March 2010 could turn out to be a blip, I don't
feel this is statistically significant. April would only need to
return to Jan/Feb levels to have more successful RFAs than admins
resigning or being desysopped. But there is a clear  longterm
downwards trend in our number of active admins, and in terms of
community health and actually getting admin stuff done the number of
active admins is more relevant (the number of admins who actively use
the tools might be even more relevant but I don't have that data).

I agree that it would be interesting to work out whether there is a
standard wiki career with most users moving on in say their third or
fourth years or whether after the first two or three years people
settle down and we only lose a certain percentage a year. If the
latter we may be able to keep the site running for many moons. If the
former we may be closer to the rocks than we think.

Month by month edit and admin activities should be extractable from
the toolserver.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ADMINSTATS has some stats on
admin activity - I think the discussions would be more meaningful if
we were measuring how many active and how many very active admins we
had.

WereSpielChequers