QUOTE(Cla68 @ Thu 5th March 2009, 6:16pm)
I believe the lack of an effective governance structure in Wikipedia contributes to admin burnout, because the admins don't really have any kind of established support foundation upon which to ground their activity, so they must feel like they're flailing away endlessly.
To my mind, the lack of a functional community governance model at Wikipedia is a fatal flaw. Other large projects (notably
Debian Linux) have highly functional governance models that keep the project focused on producing high quality product with a minimum of
sturm und drang.