Active admins as an example of entrances and exits

Active admins as an example of entrances and exits

Regarding the graph showing that the number of active administrators continuing to fall: That's a good illustration of combining two things into a single graph. One matter is the activity pattern of a person who becomes an admin. For example, has anything changed between a person who became an admin in 2005 versus 2007 versus 2009? The other matter is how many people are becoming admins. You'll find (as is well known in the English Wikipedia community among those posting at the discussion page of WP:RFA) that every year sees fewer and fewer candidates being successful at becoming an admin (which requires community approval).

I raise this point because, for the larger issue of why total editing is flat to declining, the cause can be a change in behavior of those who have become contributors (say, people stopping editing more quickly) or because fewer people join (or both). And these two issues can have totally different solutions - for example, more recognition for existing editors, versus more recruiting of new editors. Or, to put it briefly: why people join is usually different from why people drop out. John Broughton 22:40, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

John Broughton22:40, 2 November 2010

Dear John, This chart has been added by User:Saeed.Veradi and I think it has been added as an extra illustration of the stagnation in participation. Hopefully, the cohort analysis that we will conduct will reveal whether people stop editing more quickly or that fewer people join.

Drdee15:47, 3 November 2010
 

"how many people are becoming admins" Stats from pl wiki are here if you want: commons:Category:Polish Wikipedia statistics - PUA.

Przykuta 08:38, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

85.202.159.5208:38, 13 December 2010

Any idea what it means? It looks like there's a correlation between more rejections, fewer applicants, and longer RFA discussions. The most obvious hypothesis is that longer RFAs are scaring off applicants and causing many to be rejected. But it's hard to know the cause-and-effect without actually reading some of the talk pages across several applicants and years. (In Polish.)

Randomran17:09, 18 December 2010

Pages with questions and discussions are here: accepted and here: rejected.

Przykuta08:50, 19 December 2010

I have some stats on the RFA situation on EN wiki where active admins dropped 12% last year. The finding that most intrigues me is that people with 1-3 years experience are rarely becoming admins. Nearly 90% of our admins on EN wiki first became editors more than four years ago. Either we have few qualified editors from 2007-2009 or they are not coming forward. My own experience, though I haven't collected stats on this is that the current de facto criteria including 4,000 manual edits and 12 months tenure are way above the criteria that applied when most of our admins passed RFA.

Comparing Polish and EN wiki experiences is interesting. Has the Polish wiki gone through an unbundling exercise? In early 2008 EN wiki unbundled the Rollback tool and gave it to non-admin vandalfighters, this coincided with a major drop in successful adminships which halved from an average of one a day to an average of one every two days. Also what is the Polish definition of an active admin? On EN wiki we have 746 admins who have done at least one edit in the last 90 days. But of them 539 are considered Semi-active in that they have done fewer than 30 edits in the last two months, leaving 207 admins who have done more than 30 edits in the last two months.

WereSpielChequers17:57, 18 February 2011

10% of admins are no active last year in pl wiki. About experience: number of edits to become an admin, number of days to become an admin. Since 2009 users "need" more than a year to be an admin. Here is a list of active and absent admins with last edits by date. Rollback is used in pl wiki by reviewers since November 2009 (~2000 users are reviewers in pl wiki). We have 170 (150 active or semi-active) admins and rather small community. 170 admins and 6k active users. It wiki: 100 admins and 9k active users. But we start "removing administrator rights" for admins no-active in last year (no active as users in main space). Przykuta 14:59, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Przykuta14:59, 10 March 2011

We have considered removing admin tools from inactive admins, apparently Commons did this and lost half their admins. One reason why we decided not to do this on EN wiki is that we do have a trickle of admins returning from long gaps, and we didn't want to lose that.

82.44.82.23822:23, 13 March 2011
 

I'd be curious to ask a sample of editors from the past 3 years why they haven't decided to become an admin. Maybe compare that to the early adopters, and ask them why they decided to become an admin.

Randomran22:55, 14 March 2011

I've been fairly active in the RFA process on EN Wiki and nominated half a dozen of the last hundred new admins.

I haven't done a scientific sample, but most of the people I've nominated I first approached by Email, and I've approached a much larger number who I thought would make good admins. Most of the people I've approached have turned me down, and most of them because they don't fancy RFA.

WereSpielChequers18:00, 25 May 2011

Yeah, the environment around RFA is pretty nasty. The good news is if that's the main concern that people have, it's within our reach to fix it.

Randomran23:53, 25 May 2011