Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-07-31/Special report

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Special report

Administrator cadre continues to contract

The admin count trend is down. For more graphics, see User:Widefox/editors.

Coming as no surprise to those who have been following the remarkably linear decrease in the total number of administrators, a new record was recently set: fewer than 500 active admins.[a]

Trends

About 45% of all admins are active.

The large graphic above plots the total number of administrators (+) each month since 2011. That year was chosen as the beginning of the "inactive admin suspension rule", under which the privilege is removed for user accounts that don't make any admin actions for a period of time. The points are fitted to a linear trend line. The trend is a consistently decreasing admin count since 2011. Widefox, who has been maintaining trend graphs at User:Widefox/editors since 2017, shared this analysis: "A linear decline trend in the number of admins is a good fit with r2 = 0.994 . The WP:FRAMBAN loss of admins is a significant drop in the last two years, but similar to fluctuations before 2017."

A second chart to the right shows the active editor fraction: between 40 and 50 percent of all administrator accounts are active at a given time. If you look at the official tally (raw data compiled by bots), the active editor count peaked at just over 1000 in 2008, declined over the next few years to around 550, and has oscillated steadily between 510 and 570 since early 2017. Every tally during 2019 has been in the 43–46% range.

Trends explained

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