User talk:WereSpielChequers

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Hi I know you've been here for quite awhile, but were never welcomed, so here it is. cheers --Jules (Mrjulesd) 08:53, 5 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, glad to meet someone active in WikiBooks. WereSpielChequers (discuss • contribs) 10:54, 5 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Hi WereSpielChequers, there is currently a proposal at Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals for non-admins to be given the ability of Suppress redirect and Move subpages. Since you’ve been an active user on Wikibooks for the last thirty day, I thought you might join in by giving feedback/opinion or amendments. Thank you so much for your time Synoman Barris (discuss • contribs) 12:57, 14 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

I met you years ago on the English Wikipedia and I still remember you because you taught me something very important that I still remember to this day: most enwp-newbies start editing by making very small changes scubas correcting spelling mistakes. Up to that point I could not figure out why I was drawing so much attention to my edits, IIRC my first edit was to create an article about a Canadian wannabe-politician.

Earlier today I was sniffing around wiki-books as I do occasionally with the hope of finding something useful to do here when I ran into @Girdi and discovered that we almost shared a wikimedia-birthday (they joined enwb two days after I joined enwp). According to grid's xtools analysis on enwb they were quite busy in their early years bt tapered off and finally seem to have disappeared about 5 years ago, which is a real shame because I would have liked to ask them couple of things.

Anyway the reason I am contacting you is to find out if you know where I can obtain statistics on wikimedians such as:

• How many years do wikimedians with (say) 1000 "edits" stay around the projects?
• What are the stated reasons such wikimedians give when they leave
• What are some other possible reasons, not necessarily articulated

I apologize for this wall of text and hope I am not distracting you from other valuable work. I will subscribe to this thread and hopefully some day when I'm visit enwb I will be rewarded with a reply. Thanks in advance, Ottawahitech (discuss • contribs) 16:20, 8 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hi Ottawahitech, good to see you around. I know we discussed retention and surveying past users, I think it would have been circa 2009 I took part in some discussions. I vaguely remember a survey being done by emailing editors who seemed to have stopped editing with one question being why did you leave, and one of the most common answers being "I haven't left yet". Obviously enabling email and still having that same email a few years later screens the former editors, and the longer the gap the greater various skews become - these days I'm conscious that a lot of former editors are dead. I started looking at retention a while ago when I realised that those who become admins tend to last along time as do people who get involved in GLAM, at least at the British Museum event. You might be interested in :EN:User:WereSpielChequers/2012-2016_Editor_retention_test - my prize marker group are the 9 Wikimedians who attended in person, and yes this is skewed by my being one of them. Nearly fifteen years later we have lost two. Two more edited last month and five of us have edits logged in January 2025.

More details might be best found at meta:Ask_a_question/FAQ/Research#I_want_to_pitch_a_new_project_to_Research_and_Data,_what_should_I_do? WereSpielChequers (discuss • contribs) 19:00, 8 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

So refreshing to get a friendly response! I know one should NOT surround oneself with yes-men only but I find that too many of the people who post to my user-talk sometime make me want to hide under a rock. I guess I still have not figured out how to talk to those who figure I don't have any feelings, or I am out to destroy something they care about, or they don't like something or other about me....

Anyway, back to the topic of useful statistics. Sorry I still have not had the chance to look closely at the two links you provided, but some of the things you mentioned right here got me thinking. For example "a lot of former editors are dead". I only found out that a lot of of admins were teenagers when they started their wiki-career. Since I have never entertained such a wiki-career-move, I guess I was oblivious to this important statistic, and kept making the mistake when talking to such people of assuming that they were adults. This seemed to rub some them the wrong way, and many were happy to jump to the conclusion that my motivation around the projects was spamming, trolling, outing, or some of the other poorly defined negative traits. Some part of me wishes that I understood this before I got myself painted into a corner with seemingly no way out, but I digress, as usual..

Back to "a lot of former editors are dead": If so many of the most active editors were teenagers when they started why are so many already dead - this project is what? 2025-2001=24 years old. Let's say the average teenager on wikimedia is 17. if you add the number that means those teenagers are no older than late twenties early thirties today. So why are so many dead? Is it possible that there are/were many more older adults that are not counted in our statistics? or are people dying much sooner than they used to? or...

Your comment about "I haven't left yet" also rings a bell. Back in the days when I was looking for editors to add to missing wikipedians, I used to leave messages on user-talk pages of people who made a lot of "edits" but stopped. I vaguely remember that this brought out some who apparently were watching their talk even if they were silent otherwise. After that I never assumed that just because someone's not actively participating does not mean they are not watching their talk, which got me into trouble when I posed a question to a non-active admin, but here I am starting to digress again...

I'll have to remember to come back here when I have my thoughts on the topic of useful statistics better organized. I hope you don't mind my ramble. Cheers, Ottawahitech (discuss • contribs) 13:07, 12 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hi, Yes at one point a lot of new admins on Wikipedia were teenagers, but that's a lot in the sense of a sizable minority and more than you'd expect in an entirely random group of people. I doubt if we ever had a majority of our admins under 18. More to the point, after the unbundling of rollback in early 2008 the de facto standards at RFA rose to include an expectation that new admins had demonstrated that they could add content to the pedia supported by inline cites to reliable sources. "Good Vandalfighter" ceased to be sufficient qualification for new admins. Allegedly our trickle of new admins since 2008 has included the occasional minor, but I'd be surprised if there'd been as much as 1% of our admins aged under 18 at any time in the last decade. While a 13 year old in 2007 would be 30 today, so I'm pretty sure we now underrepresent the under 30s in our admin community. We have also lost a few young and youngish editors, including at least a couple I'm aware of who had health conditions that kept them out of most jobs - but you can be a Wikipedian even if you are bedridden. The deceased have usually been from the other end of the age spectrum - we do have a growing proportion of retirees in the community, including many people far older than you'd normally expect to see in a workplace community. Again retirees may still be a minority of admins, but anyone who was over 80 at the beginning of 2005 would be over 100 today, if they are still alive. I don't have numbers to test whether our death rates are lower or higher than comparable populations would be, but I'm pretty sure we have more editors in the US than in the UK, so the benchmark might look more like the US than UK. WereSpielChequers (discuss • contribs) 23:08, 12 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hi WereSpielChequers, I have been a professional student all my life, so love being educated by you here. I hope you don't mind?.

Re: "Good Vandalfighter" ceased to be sufficient qualification for new admins

I did not know that admin rights were unbundled in 2008, and have not had the time to look for the discussion that lead to this on ENWP. Too bad that many of the smaller wikimedia projects are still to this day adding new admins who are only good at "vandal-fighting", which I admit I know little about. The problem I see with that is that it creates a fast-track for people whose only motivation is to climb the ranks in the wiki-world as fast as possible with no regard whatsoever to the bulldog of knowledge. It would not be a problem if only a few of these users belonged to this group, but it sure looks to me like they are fast becoming the majority Ottawahitech (discuss • contribs) 15:52, 22 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hi, there have been a number of different unbundlings over the years, file mover, template editor etc, rollback was the one that had most effect on the RFA process in the English Wikipedia community. I'm not familiar with adminship on the smaller wikis, I've talked to admins on DE and FR and I know some on Commons. But I'm really not in a position to comment on them let alone the little ones. One thing that concerns me about the structure we have created is that the people doing the job aren't being given one of the key tools that they need. We need to block around a million vandals etc every year (on En wiki alone we have administered over 20 million blocks in the last twenty years.) Yes there are blocks for other reasons, including contentious blocks within the community, but they are rare. We have volunteers in the community who take on the task of dealing with vandals, but we don't give them one of the most important tools they need. To my mind this is a problem. As for people whose only motivation is to climb the ranks of the Wiki-world, we've now had over two thousand people become admins. less than 2% of them have become Crats and a similarly small percentage have become arbs. While we don't know any hidden motivations of people standing for admin, and "assume bad faith" is pretty much the opposite of our policy, we do know that the vast majority of the more than two thousand people who have become admins show no sign of trying to "climb ranks" in the movement. WereSpielChequers (discuss • contribs) 13:04, 23 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

When I said fast-track for people whose only motivation is to climb the ranks in the wiki-world, I meant the smaller wikis, such as wiki-quote, and possibly even in Wikidata (I have not studied it closely), but definitely not the ENWP. I see the same Users hopping from project to project trying to collect hats, without contributing to content, unless it is through "Vandal-fighting". I think the prize for them is Stewardship or a paid job with the foundation, but I am only speculating. Any idea how one could study this speculation more scientifically? Ottawahitech (discuss • contribs) 16:24, 23 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Well you could ask someone at the WMF whether they target their recruitment at such people. If you see them hopping between different language projects then I'm pretty sure some of the WMF jobs would be tailor made for them - multi lingual people who have contributed time to multiple wikis.

ON ENWP we used to have people argue that some of our admin candidates were just "hat collectors" who didn't use the mop they'd just acquired. But that myth got debunked from a combination of:

1. Someone pointed out that the adminstats only had access to data since December 2004. That might not make much of a difference these days, but a decade or so ago it certainly did. There were a bunch of early admins miscounted by this.
2. If you just look at relatively recent admins they almost all have an active admin phase. But before the unbundlings there were candidates who just wanted access to the spamfilter, or wanted to use huggle and needed rollback first. Such people might now look like they didn't use the tools they had applied for, but that view of them is misleading.
3. You could look at the edits of some of the people who you suspect of not contributing to content. You might find that some have a wiki they add content to as well as ones where people take different roles.

WereSpielChequers (discuss • contribs) 07:50, 29 January 2025 (UTC)Reply