[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 1:04 AM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

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

I remain convinced (gut feeling not based on statistics) that
Wikipedia growth and development goes in phases, and that after an
initial near-exponential growth stage (which we may be exiting) there
is a long plateau-like stage where obscure gaps can be filled in. But
crucially I think the gaps are larger (take up more room) than the
existing framework, and so the time that it will take to fill in the
gaps is much longer than people think. Inclusionists (to use the
existing terminology that I don't really agree with) think that the
eventual size of the encyclopedia will be very large, and others push
back against having articles that are too obscure and only marginally
supported by a few sources.

The strictly source-based approach that insists that most verifiable
material can be placed somewhere in the encyclopedia means that you
need an army of highly-experienced and top-quality writers and
researchers with increasing access to a wide range of sources and who
are comfortable using those sources properly to write a compendium of
knowledge (i.e. Wikipedia). But I think that phase of the development
will take longer than the initial creation (over the past period which
is now approaching 10 years). It could take anything up to 50 years
(to pick a random figure out of the air).

Of course, it might be better to focus efforts on improving the
existing articles, but volunteers always work with what takes their
fancy. In the end a mixture of approaches is what get used, but I do
think that small studies of limited areas to see how they have
developed (or even regressed) over a period of years would help give
an idea of what count as "progress" here.

And I'm not overly worried about admin levels. Editor levels are what
is most important, and admins will always emerge from the pool of
those that edit. Admins that specialise too much and lose touch with
editing are more of a concern, in my opinion.

Carcharoth