Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-08-15/Special report

Thirteen years ago today, I wrote a Signpost article, which among other things lamented that a Wikigeneration gap was emerging. At that time, over 90% of our administrators had made their first edit more than three and a half years earlier.

Things have not gotten better over time. Actually, they have gotten worse! In 2010, 90% of admins had made their first edit more than three and a half years prior. In 2023, 99% of our admins made their first edits over four and a half years ago. As for that 90% threshold I used in 2010? Over 90% of current admins made their first edit before I wrote that article. As an editor who started in 2007, I'm still relatively new compared to most of our admins — a majority of whom joined the project in 2005 or earlier.

In thirteen years, the Wikigeneration gap has widened by twelve years.

This is a comparison of the admins of August 2010 versus the admins of August 2023, by the year they created their account on the English Wikipedia. Note that in some cases (many in more recent years) it won't be the same editors — this is when people started editing, not when they became admins. The 2010–11 study is here.

I can understand why we don't yet have any admins who started editing in 2022 or 2023: few candidates now succeed without two years' experience in the community, and candidates with only one year of experience are very rare indeed. But I'm surprised at how few admins we have who joined the community in the entire decade of the 2010s, and especially with the class of 2016. Why do we only have two admins who started editing in that year?

This study looks at admins not by when they became admins, but by when they joined the community. If this inspires someone to go off and analyse things by when people became admins, then I'd be interested to see the result; I think both approaches are potentially interesting (to be honest, I suspect that I used account creation date for the 2010 study because it was easier for me to get that data). As for the 2023 study, there is an advantage in repeating the same analysis (on the same benchmark) thirteen years later. But the results are starker, as many of the three hundred new admins we've had since I published that article thirteen years ago were already editing at that point.

On the flip side, I doubt if anyone imagined thirteen years ago that so many of us would still be adminning on this site thirteen years later. My hope is that we can persuade some Wikipedians who joined the community in the 2010s to become admins; I'm sure there are many of you who would pass easily. But given the fact that we have kept Wikipedia supplied with admins through the last decade, less by recruiting more of them than by retaining the ones we had, I'm confident that if Wikipedia is still here in 2036, many of our current admins will still be around.

I just hope they are outnumbered by new recruits.