Wikipedia talk:List of administrators/stat table

Extrapolations

We really need to know how long the current RFA problems can persist for before the admin shortage causes such problems that we simply appoint a bunch of admins. This is useful but it doesn't give us the data for such an extrapolation because:

1. It takes Rikbot's definition of an active admin, some people meet that definition without being particularly active as the test is 30 edits in 60 days, others may be active as editors but not use the admin tools for months. We really need to measure the much smaller number of admins who do 90% of the admin actions.
2. With RFA broken since at least 2008 the number of new admins is only a shadow of what it once was, and if new admins take a disproportionate part of the admin load then we really need to keep tabs on their decline. The declining number of admins could either mean that we have a retention problem or a recruitment problem, and other stats show that we have an admin recruitment problem.
3. We don't know whether the length of a wiki career can be predicted or even if it follows a pattern. ϢereSpielChequers 12:37, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

It would, in fact, be fascinating to see some visualized statistics of the durations of wiki careers, based on arrival and departure times, with indications of status changes (e.g. gaining or losing tools, blocks, etc.) While there are obviously an uncountable variety of reasons for leaving, some trends may still be visible. Maybe we could mine WP:Missing Wikipedians. — Hex (❝?!❞) 22:03, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

My suspicion is that RFA makes a big difference on this, those who become admins then have greatly extended wiki careers, those whose RFAs tank are often lost. We do lose a proportion of admins every year, but what I'm not sure is whether this can be simply extrapolated. My suspicion is that there is a profound age effect, along with the general greying of the pedia the same thing is happening in the admin corps; Younger admins come and go, but when we recruit a silver surfer they tend to stick longterm. ϢereSpielChequers 10:04, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Note

Hello fellow Wikipedians, I am updating the page, but calculating averages as total number/total units -1 to get realistic averages. Toadette ^{(let's chat together)} 15:00, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for updating the table from Jan 2020 to May 2021! I managed to get it fully updated (for now) to March 2024 by using Excel to calculate the average of the active admins on each day of the month based on Rick Bot's edit summaries at Wikipedia:List of administrators given that the table's notes instruct that post-Sept 2007 data should be "collected daily by Rick Bot and averaged together." I am honestly not sure what you mean by total number and total units, but I applied my procedure to May 2021 and got the same result as you (491 active admins) and your segment does not seem to differ from the trends before and after, so fingers crossed the same method was used throughout 🤞 BluePenguin18 🐧 ( 💬 ) 10:47, 16 April 2024 (UTC)