The "Small Wikipedia" problem

Getting in the door is the issue, the projects have become massive and hostile bureaucracies now. RfA is an example of the worst of both the hostilities and the complexities.

The single most important deterrent to newcomers and source of frustration for veteran non-admin users is the existence of an immobile oligarchy. There's a graph somewhere here that pretty much confirmed what I've been suspecting: the "admin class" is becoming more and more impenetrable - apparently one is only 'forced' to accept a new admin if the workload is too large for the current admin manpower to handle, because for each new user that is granted adminship powers, the 'power per capita' that a single admin has decreases. I call it the Small Wikipedia problem because it is far more apparent in smaller Wikipedias, where a handful of ruling admins have complete control of everything that is written on their Wikipedia, which is used to spread propaganda of their own POV.

The Catalan language Wikipedia is a perfect example of this. At first glance, that Wikipedia is a tremendous success - a small population of speakers has produced a Wikipedia with a number of articles in the same order of magnitude as the Wikipedias of some world languages. However, one realizes soon that the vast majority of its articles are corrected machine translations of Spanish Wikipedia articles. A non-negligible number of them are also English and French language translations, and just a handful are of genuine authorship - and thus, useful. Its articles have an extreme Catalan separatist POV - an opinion held by a small minority among the whole real-world Catalan society - and basically the admins there do what they want. Is that really a "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"? I don't think so, unless you meant a "free as in free beer encyclopedia that anyone can edit as long as you use the POV that I want".

The admin election game (WP:RFA) is basically a positive sum game where those interested suck up to each other. It's like having politicians elect each other.

If only it were that good. In reality, the best qualified users are too afraid to go to RfA, because it has become a venue for every old feud to be brought up, where users are allowed to be nasty to each other, and where strange and ever changing artificial measures of worth are applied irregularly. The day that Chzz, who in my opinion is the single most highly qualified person for adminship that is not one already, no longer feels afraid to run at RfA, we can call the process fixed. Until then adminship will be a huge issue. The number of promotions is dropping fast, the number of burnouts is too high, and there is a host of qualified people that are put off by the atmosphere in that area.