This page shows some charts posted by Durin on WT:RFA, the most recent on top.
2006 RfA In Review
editSorry this was delayed. It takes a lot of work, and I didn't get around to it until a couple of weeks ago to bring the data up to date.
| 2006 RfA Year in Review | 2006 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| New RfAs posted: | 885 | ||
| Successful RfAs: | 344 (38.8%) | ||
| Early withdrawn RfAs: | 387 (43.7%) | ||
| Self nominations: | 435 (49.0%) | ||
| Noms with <1000 edits: | 191 (21.6%) | ||
| Average number of opinions expressed per successful RfA: | 78.8 | ||
| Average number of opinions expressed per unsuccessful RfA:1 | 68.0 | ||
| Success rates based on edit count of all nominees with at least... | |||
| All RfAs | 38.8% | ||
| >1000 edits | 49.6% | ||
| >2000 edits | 55.9% | ||
| >2000 edits, self-nom only | 35.5% | ||
| >3000 edits | 60.8% | ||
| >3000 edits, self-nom only | 44.4% | ||
| >4000 edits | 62.2% | ||
| >4000 edits, self-nom only | 44.3% | ||
| >5000 edits | 63.5% | ||
| >5000 edits, self-nom only | 43.4% | ||
| >10000 edits | 63.0% | ||
| >10000 edits, self-nom only | 45.0% | ||
| Success rates based on time on Wikipedia of all nominees with at least... | |||
| >2 months | 42.2% | ||
| >4 months | 45.3% | ||
| >6 months | 48.0% | ||
| >1 year | 48.5% | ||
| Average edit count of successful noms: | 7153 | ||
| Average edit count of unsuccessful noms: | 3445 | ||
- 1 - Unsuccessful nominations only includes those nominations that were not withdrawn early and were not successful. This is the smallest subset of RfAs, typically comprising less than 20% of all RfAs.
Some observations from my chair:
- I was astonished at the very rapid increase in the average number of edits for successful nominations. Compare to Image:AverageEditCountatRfA.png which covers the period of August '05 to March of '06. The more current chart above shows a much steeper rise in standards, and shows a non-flat line now of increasing average number of edit counts for failing RfAs. There's a number of different ways to look at this data, and this is but one way. Nevertheless, the trend was startling to me.
- I was fairly amazed at the reduction in average number of votes per RfA showing a pretty steady decline for the last three quarters of 2006. I was expecting an increase.
- 3000 edits still seems to be the cutoff beyond which editcountitis seems to have less of an effect.
- Self-nominations are still showing a roughly 20% less chance of success.
- I often hear the complaint that nominees with high edit counts routinely fail. The data above does not support this conclusion. Success rates plateau after 3000 edits and show not much motion thereafter. If anything, they increase slightly.
Enjoy. --Durin 20:41, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
August 2006 WP:RFA in Review
edit| August 2006 RfA in Review | This month | Last month | Feb-Jul |
|---|---|---|---|
| New RfAs posted: | 72 | 78 | 459 |
| Successful RfAs: | 27 (38%) | 26 (33%) | 183 (40%) |
| Early withdrawn RfAs: | 29 (40%) | 38 (49%) | 191 (42%) |
| Self nominations: | 38 (53%) | 39 (50%) | 216 (47%) |
| Noms with <1000 edits: | 17 (24%) | 19 (24%) | 99 (22%) |
| Average number of votes per successful RfA: | 76 | 97 | 86 |
| Success rates based on edit count of all nominees with at least... | |||
| All RfAs | 38% | 33% | 40% |
| >1000 edits | 49% | 44% | 51% |
| >2000 edits | 55% | 48% | 57% |
| >3000 edits | 61% | 53% | 62% |
| >4000 edits | 67% | 49% | 61% |
| >5000 edits | 67% | 50% | 61% |
| Success rates based on time on Wikipedia of all nominees with at least... | |||
| >2 months | 41% | 35% | 43% |
| >4 months | 47% | 38% | 46% |
| >6 months | 53% | 42% | 49% |
| Average edit count of successful noms: | 7499 | 6776 | 6222 |
| Average edit count of unsuccessful noms: | 3888 | 3262 | 3052 |
--Durin 13:59, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
July 2006 WP:RFA in Review
edit| This month 1 | Last month | Six months ago | |
|---|---|---|---|
| New RfAs posted: | 78 | 79 | 83 |
| Successful RfAs: | 28 (36%) | 26 (33%) | 37 (45%) |
| Early withdrawn RfAs: | 38 (49%) | 38 (48%) | 29 (35%) |
| Self nominations: | 39 (50%) | 40 (51%) | 30 (36%) |
| Noms with <1000 edits: | 19 (24%) | 22 (28%) | 13 (16%) |
| Average number of votes per successful RfA: | 91 | 88 | 61 |
| Success rates based on edit count of all nominees with at least... | |||
| All RfAs | 36% | 33% | 45% |
| >1000 edits | 47% | 45% | 53% |
| >2000 edits | 53% | 49% | 59% |
| >3000 edits | 58% | 54% | 65% |
| >4000 edits | 54% | 50% | 63% |
| >5000 edits | 57% | 47% | 65% |
| Success rates based on time on Wikipedia of all nominees with at least... | |||
| >2 months | 38% | 38% | 49% |
| >4 months | 41% | 39% | 52% |
| >6 months | 42% | 41% | 54% |
| Average edit count of successful noms: | 6713 | 7039 | 6701 |
| Average edit count of unsuccessful noms: | 3157 | 3144 | 2871 |
1 - July data is preliminary and assumes success of Ambuj.Saxena, Phaedriel, Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, Crazycomputers, MisfitToys, GHe and failure of SynergeticMaggot.
--Durin 21:27, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Successful at under 80%
edit- Here's a list of RfAs since June 23, 2005 that had less than 80% raw vote support and passed. The numbers are support/(support+oppose). Neutral votes have not been taken into account.
- Nightstallion 79.7%
- BorgHunter 79.3%
- Aaron Brenneman(2nd) 78.6%
- Lucky 6.9(4th) 78.3%
- Nandesuka 78.2%
- The Land(2nd) 77.8%
- Alkivar(3rd) 77.5%
- Extreme Unction 77.2%
- Ramallite 77.1%
- EvanProdromou 76.5%
- Hedley(2nd) 75.8%
- Johann Wolfgang 75.5%
- Freestylefrappe(2nd) 74.5%
- Luigi30(3rd) 72.4%
- --Durin 15:58, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
Actual stats on # of admins <3 months
editFrom time to time, I see people making generalizations about the changes in RfA. A recent one was that the average number of votes has gone up significantly, so getting 30 votes should be easy. My stats show the average number of votes has remained virtually unchanged over the last 400 RfA.
Similarly, I see a claim here that we are regularly promoting people with less than 3 months experience. The reality does not bear this out. Out of 285 successful RfAs since June 27th, just 10 of them have had less than 90 days since their first edit (or 3.5%), and only one had less than 2,000 edits:
Editor Days Edits (at time of nom) Phroziac 89 1083 JoanneB 89 6747 Redwolf24 87 2414 Jtkiefer 86 2601 Journalist 84 3230 Jkelly 82 3704 Flcelloguy 79 2886 NSLE 73 2071 Bmicomp 72 4904 Izehar 54 4547
Of these, only Redwolf24 had an RfC filed against him, but that was three months after becoming an admin. At least, no RfCs against these people where the RfC was titled rfc/<username>.
Our users/admin ratio is the third highest among major wikipedias m:Administrators_of_various_Wikipedias. Only Japanese and Spanish wikipiedias have a worse ratio. This would seem to suggest that we need *more* admins, and not less.
Of note; if the bar had been 12 months for the last 285 successful admins, 162 would not have qualified. I wouldn't call you a jerk for such a voting standard, but you will receive a lot of flack for it from a number of people. I made attempts at getting people to stop attacking people on RfA, and was roundly attacked for it (I guess that's no surprise). So, the atmosphere of personal assault continues at RfA.
I also echo some of the comments made by Friday; quite a bit of the most egregious behavior has been exhibited by long time members of this community, apparently feeling they can act with impunity. The said thing is, they're right. To a person, they've gone unsanctioned.
The problem here isn't that the pool of admins is any worse than it was in the past. The problem here is that there are more bad admins because there are more admins in general. Furthermore, that there is no accountability loop, and no feedback mechanisms on admin behavior. And worse, (see section below on Wikipedia riots) ArbCom has essentially invalidated all policies except WP:IAR recently.
RfA does a good job of weeding out seriously bad candidates. I don't think there's anything wrong with the process in so far as how it approves candidates. --Durin 20:24, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
Familiarity with policy
editIn my opinion, one of the reasons activity level is important for an admin to be successful is, as others have noted, ongoing familiarity with policy. A part time admin who applies policy could cause considerable problems among users who feel they are following policy, only to find they are violating policy as the part time admin sees it. Policy changes, and rapidly. Anybody...anybody...can change policy. Personally, I think this is a shortcoming of Wikipedia. Policy pages should be protected. Let's have a look at how often policies were edited over the last month:
- Wikipedia:Account deletion: 0 edits
- Wikipedia:Arbitration policy: 3 edits
- Wikipedia:Assume good faith: 2 edits
- Wikipedia:Banning policy: 5 edits
- Wikipedia:Blocking policy: 34 edits
- Wikipedia:Civility: 5 edits
- Wikipedia:Copyrights: 8 edits
- Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion: 141 edits
- Wikipedia:Deletion policy: 51 edits
- Wikipedia:Edit war: 11 edits
- Wikipedia:Image use policy: 4 edits
- Wikipedia:Naming conventions: 31 edits
- Wikipedia:Naming conventions (categories): 23 edits
- Wikipedia:No binding decisions: 1 edit
- Wikipedia:No legal threats: 3 edits
- Wikipedia:No original research: 11 edits
- Wikipedia:No personal attacks: 10 edits
- Wikimedia:Privacy policy: 3 edits
- Wikipedia:Profanity: 4 edits
- Wikipedia:Protection policy: 9 edits
- Wikipedia:Resolving disputes: 2 edits
- Wikipedia:Sock puppet: 22 edits
- Wikipedia:Three-revert rule: 4 edits
- Wikipedia:Undeletion policy: 7 edits
- Wikipedia:Verifiability: 40 edits
- Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not: 37 edits
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary: 0 edits
Of the 27 policies shown above, more than half averaged at least one edit per week. Even if we assume half of all edits on policy were vandalism and reverts, we'd still have more than one third of policy changing on average on a weekly basis. Note that this is just policy as taken from Category:Wikipedia official policy. This does not show Category:Wikipedia guidelines. There is a great deal of material that an admin not only needs to be familiar with, but needs to maintain a familiarity with. As many have, it can most certainly be argued that a conscientious and trustworthy admin will not attempt to enforce policy until they read and understand current policy. However, it can also be argued that due to the frequently changing nature of policy and guidelines, an inactive admin is hamstrung and nearly incapable of applying policy in a conscientious manner because of the frequently changing environment. An inactive admin is thus either going to make mistakes in the application of policy or self-prevented from using admin tools..so why have them? This is just one aspect of why an inactive admin candidate is of concern to some people. There are others. --Durin 14:42, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
Graph
edit
18 November 2005