Baby, baby, where did our love go? Options Rating

[A Horse With No Name]

Quebec goofball Pascal Tesson, speaking here, notes that Wikipedia now has less than 900 active admins -- with a loss of 46 this year.

So...why are so many admins either throwing away their mops or storing them in the closet? Do people really find adminship to be such a major pain in the rump?

[LaraLove]

I think people are just sick of the bullshit. The community is all but worthless. Change is impossible. More people on the project are interested with perpetuating drama than improving the encyclopedia. It gets to a point that it's just not worth it.

[A Horse With No Name]

I think people are just sick of the bullshit. The community is all but worthless. Change is impossible. More people on the project are interested with perpetuating drama than improving the encyclopedia. It gets to a point that it's just not worth it.

But you came back, foxy mama, after saying "Au revoir" to us Wiki children. And I am glad for it, for obvious reasons.

[Cla68]

Quebec goofball Pascal Tesson, speaking here, notes that Wikipedia now has less than 900 active admins -- with a loss of 46 this year.

So...why are so many admins either throwing away their mops or storing them in the closet? Do people really find adminship to be such a major pain in the rump?

This has been discussed already in several other threads, but to summarize as I understand it:

- Admin duties are dull, repetitive, never ending, and thankless.
- The same issues constantly repeat, which means that it looks like no progress is being made despite all the constant work done by admins to keep things orderly.
- There is little formalized structure to help guide admins in dealing with repetitive, structured decision-making.
- There is no admin council-type board to which admins can go to for backup, guidance, counsel, and constructive criticism. The administrative discussion forums are anarchic free-for-alls in which everyone has an opinion, usually different, so that coherent, consistent policy is impossible to establish or maintain.

In my personal opinion, I don't see how someone can concentrate on doing only admin work and gain any long-term satisfaction from participating in Wikipedia. In spite of Wikipedia's multitude of ongoing problems which are a source of great frustration to me, all I need to do is look at the article traffic statistics for some of the articles I've helped build, which are usually fairly high because of Wikipedia's Google juice, and I can feel that I've contributed something of worth to the Internet. Comments like Dan K's in this thread are satisfying also.

This post has been edited by Cla68: Mon 31st August 2009, 12:45am

[The Joy]

I know there's a lot of "behind the scenes" work that admins do, but when I look at the noticeboards (like the Administrator Noticeboards), it seems the same admin names appear over and over again. I wonder if only a handful of the 900 admins deal with meta issues (3RR blocks, closing deletions/keeps, protections, etc.) while the rest go back to writing articles and rarely use their powers unless they just stumble across something? For example, I rarely see other admins handing out 3RR blocks except William Connolley.

The "Meta" administrators suffer from cries of abuse (rightly or wrongly) by deleting things, warning and blocking people, and making other tough decisions. Over time, this wears people down. You have to be tough to deal with criticism, but if you develop a callus to it, you end up becoming a bad administrator.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

- Admin duties are dull, repetitive, never ending, and thankless.

Ah, but admins gain awesome MMORPG powers, and when you ban someone, you absorb all their strength.

[John Limey]

I know there's a lot of "behind the scenes" work that admins do, but when I look at the noticeboards (like the Administrator Noticeboards), it seems the same admin names appear over and over again. I wonder if only a handful of the 900 admins deal with meta issues (3RR blocks, closing deletions/keeps, protections, etc.) while the rest go back to writing articles and rarely use their powers unless they just stumble across something? For example, I rarely see other admins handing out 3RR blocks except William Connolley.

The "Meta" administrators suffer from cries of abuse (rightly or wrongly) by deleting things, warning and blocking people, and making other tough decisions. Over time, this wears people down. You have to be tough to deal with criticism, but if you develop a callus to it, you end up becoming a bad administrator.

Statistically speaking, a handful of admins perform a hugely disproportionate number of the admin actions. For example, of out of all deletions (5,916,292 of them), MZMcBride has performed 804,945 or nearly 14%. The top ten admins have performed approximately 1/3 of all deletions (32.3%). Similarly, the top ten have performed 28.5% of all undeletions. In page protections, 20.6% come from the top 10. In blocks, the top ten admins have made 22.1%

All in all, there have been 7,227,002 logged administrator actions on the english Wikipedia. The most active administrator, MZMcBride is responsible for 11% of them. Out of 1920 current and former admins with at least one action, the top 1% (19) of all administrators are responsible for 2,416,613 or 33.4% (just over one third). The least active 1% are responsible for only 19 actions (.0003%). The most active 5% of all administrators (96) are responsible for 55.2% of all logged admin actions.

To sum this all up, yes a very small number of admins have a hugely disproportionate effect and just matter more than the rest (at least as measured by logged actions).

[Moulton]

It's an ochlocracy, which is unsustainable, except as an MMPORG.

[Nerd]

I agree with the above sentiments, particularly of Lara and Cla68. Wikipedia just isn't what it used to be, and people are fed up. Personally though, I haven't quit yet and you'd be hard-pressed to get me to resign. Why? Because I still enjoy it, to an extent. It's not nearly as good as it was in, say, 2007, but it's not as bad as mid-2006. If you still believe in Wikipedia, you shouldn't quit. If enough of us stay on and fight the problems, things will change. Slowly, slowly. But they will.

[Moulton]

Things will change, but (if you refer to the applicable models) the likelihood of fixing the core problems is vanishingly small (and still dwindling).

[A Horse With No Name]

The carousel is still spinning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_tal...p#Active_admins