[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of active EN wiki admins

[William Pietri]

On 05/28/2010 08:31 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
> We may still have enough admins to do the urgent admin tasks for quite
> some time to come; But I can see us becoming more dependant on the
> occasional admin who can clear  a 100 article backlog at CSD in an
> hour or two, and  I fear a growing divide between admins and others.
>    

Has anybody looked at the details of the admin experience around 
particular tasks?

In debugging the user side of sites, I often look at things in game 
design terms: How easy is X to accomplish? How rewarding is success? How 
punishing is failure? What's the ratio of success to failure? Does it 
provide lasting challenge, or does it become boring? If the action 
becomes rote, is there a higher-level goal or reward?

 From the stats I've seen, my hypothesis would be that doing admin tasks 
just isn't much fun, so it wears people down over time. You get an 
initial burst of activity because somebody has leveled up and is trying 
out their new powers. And then people stick with it out of a love for 
Wikipedia, or an attachment to keeping something polished. But 
eventually day-to-day grind of the work overcome that and people drop 
out, or stick with it out of duty but become crankier.

But that's just a guess. It'd be great to see some serious user research 
on the admin experience.

William