[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins

[Gwern Branwen]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 7:34 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are you saying that a _declining_ number of administrators means a
> _growth_ in bureaucracy?  It would normally mean the opposite, either
> a loss of control, or that the ordinary members were taking the
> function upon themselves.  What I see is a greater degree of control
> and uniformity, not driven by those in formal positions of authority.

If you assume that administrators are identical to the bureaucracy or
some non-shrinking proportion thereof, then that does look like a
falsehood.

If you assume that administrators reflect rather the number of
committed long-term contributors, and their numbers wax and wane
pretty independently of the need for administrators, then that makes
sense. Little kills enthusiasm and participation as surely as
bureaucracy. Why are so few even trying for adminship?

(I remember being VP of a taekwondo club in college; I decided to get
us a locker for our gear, which we had club funds for. The paperwork
and circumlocutions nearly destroyed my merely college-student
enthusiasm, and made me seriously consider purchasing the damn locker
myself. This would've been possible because in meatspace, there are no
bots, scripts or policy wonks who would've noticed the sudden
appearance of a locker and objected.)

Indeed, aside from cutting off the branch we're sitting on,
bureaucracy diminishes the need for admins. Admins, at their best,
embody the old benevolent dictator or {{sofixit}} or IAR spirit - not
mechanically applying guidelines and deleting or not deleting, but
judging based on all factors. Bureaucracies on the other hand, seek
ever more automation and de-humanizing of the process. Consider
WP:PROD. I used to clear out PRODs myself, and I know that some admins
who did similar work took the PROD process as a reason not to think -
if the PROD has been unchallenged for several days, then it must be
deleted. There were good reasons to not be mechanical; some articles
were vandalized and then prodded, or deliberately edited down, or were
reasonable articles. But there you have it anyway.

You only need 1 admin to delete a few dozen or hundred PRODs; even
fewer, if the occasional suggestions for admin bots go through. You
need many more admins to read through a few hundred AfDs and ponder
the right decision.

If the increasing bureaucracy idea is right, we should expect our
contributor base to shrink and especially to see fewer edits by new
users survive.

This is the case.

New articles are down significantly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia#Wikipedia_growth

Edits and new users are down, and reverts are up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/Log_analysis

Felipe Ortege's thesis mentions:

     “In the first place, we note the remarkable difference between
the English and the German language versions. The first one presents
one of the worst survival curves in this series, along with the
Portuguese Wikipedia, whereas the German version shows the best
results until approximately 800 days. From that point on, the Japanese
language version is the best one. In fact, the German, French,
Japanese and Polish Wikipedias exhibits some of the best survival
curves in the set, and only the English version clearly deviates from
this general trend. The most probable explanation for this difference,
taking into account that we are considering only logged authors in
this analysis, is that the English Wikipedia receives too
contributions from too many casual users, who never come back again
after performing just a few revisions.”

(The last sentence could as well be summarized: people are trying en,
and not coming back.)

And it's not like there isn't a lot to write about. (See eg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwiki_and_specialized_knowledge_test#Updates
)

Some of these statistics are old. But I don't know of any newer more
optimistic data.

-- 
gwern