Proposal:Study administrative contributions

Status (see valid statuses)

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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Strategic Priorities

This proposal is associated with the bolded strategic priorities below.

1. Achieve continued growth in readership
2. Focus on quality content
3. Increase Participation.
4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
5. Encourage Innovation.

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Summary

In order to get a sense of Administrator workload, we will take a random sample of 20 to 25 administrators on the English Wikipedia and look at their contribution histories.

Proposal

The process would involve finding a random sample of 20 to 25 administrators. For each administrator in that sample, we would:

• Use a tool to examine their contribution breakdown (based on namespace)
• Find out when they became an admin
• Subtract contributions before they became an admin, and calculate their admin edits

Optional

• Flag their top 5 favorite Wikipedia spaces, for the sake of comparison

Motivation

This would help us to:

• Understand administrative workload
• Understand how administrative workload might interfere with article building and editing
• Understand what motivates editors to do administrative work
• Understand what might cause administrators to burn out or leave
• Understand disruptive activities that create administrative backlog

Key Questions

• How much time do administrators spend on different parts of the namespace? (e.g.: articles, talk pages, project pages)
• Are there key parts of the project-namespace that get a lot of attention? (e.g.: noticeboards, policies, etc.)
• Is Wikipedia effective at dealing with disruptions, or are these disruptions burning out good contributors?

Potential Costs

• Some volunteer time

See Also

• en:Wikipedia:List of administrators/Active List of currently active en admins (over 30 edits in last 60 days)
• en:Wikipedia:ADMINSTATS List and stats of all en wiki accounts that have ever made an admin action, including former admins
• en:Wikipedia:Administrator review existing admin review system

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Study administrative contributions.

Want to work on this proposal?

We need a few editors who are willing to study a handful of editors, adding up to at least 20. More would be helpful.

1. (I'll take 5) Randomran 16:09, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
2. Eekim 22:32, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
3. (I'll take 5) Noraft 08:49, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
4. (I'll take 5) Richard asr 17:34, 15 August 2010 (UTC)