User talk:Bri/Signpost draft 0

Quick note
If you're going to focus on the 500 figure, then one of the graphs will need to be the raw "number of active admins" figure from bot update, otherwise it's just going to confuse readers. The raw number of admins is a good chart for showing the downwards trend, but doesn't specify how many of those admins are actually out adminning and how many are just making a couple of token edits each year to hang onto their permissions. Personally I'd omit the "percentage of admins which are active" chart, which without context make it looks like the total has been stable for years. (The "number of active admins" figure has the additional advantage of being the only metric that's completely unaffected by the 2011 discontinuity, since those admins who were affected by inactivity desysops were by definition not being counted in it anyway, so it allows one to show the trend right back to 2007.) &#8209; Iridescent 19:55, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * 500 is an arbitrary threshold. I'll plot the number of active admins on the same chart as the total (tomorrow). Widefox ; talk 22:13, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * It's arbitrary, but it's psychologically significant; firstly because it's a round number, and second because it's (almost) exactly half the peak. (If I'm counting right, the peak for active admins was 1017 rather than a round 1000, but in either case we dropped below the 50% mark this week.) The 100,000-to-1 pages-to-active-admins ratio—which we're on course to hit at around the beginning of September—is significant for the same reason: it may be meaningless in and of itself, but it clarifies the issue for people who don't understand the figures. To most people, "downward long term trend" just sounds like school; everyone can understand "we simultaneously have more work that needs doing and fewer people doing it". &#8209; Iridescent 22:20, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
 * A metric about admin work throughput or work queue/response time etc metric may be the way for that, rather than psychological numbers. That's then independent of automation or other efficiency improvements in the admin numbers. Widefox ; talk 00:26, 30 July 2019 (UTC)