[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 10:54 PM, Phantomsteve
<wikipedia at phantom-enterprises.co.uk> wrote:

<snip>

> Has anyone compared the activity rate of admins over time to that of
> non-admins? For example, what %age of admins whose accounts were created in
> 2006 are active, compared to the %age of non-admins whose accounts were
> created in 2006?

Probably not (though it would be good to be proved wrong!).

People sometimes forget how big Wikipedia is. It is difficult to know
exactly what is going if people don't do the boring number crunching
and statistical analysis. I thought that at some point various WMF
people were tasked with doing this, and there are various automated
statistics, but to get meaningful answers to these questions will
require someone to actual extract the data and analyse it. It is
possible that the task is so daunting that only bits and pieces have
been looked at.

There are certainly enough suggestions here and on-wiki to keep
several people busy a while, so it would be good to organise that both
to make sure the analysis does get done, and to avoid duplication of
effort or wasted analysis.

For an idea of what is out there, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_statistics

Trouble is, that doesn't really do more than scratch the surface.

Carcharoth