Tony Sidaway wrote:
Is that really true, though? How many editors do we
have doing RC
patrol? I'm on #wikipedia-en-vandalism right now and there are about
a dozen voiced users (ie regulars) on channel. Most of them are
idling. A load of other editors will be involved at any one time in
fixing recent change, but if you look at the deletion log and see who
is doing deletions and restores, you can get a maximum value for the
number of editors who have been on active patrol today. 57 editors
are responsible for the last 500 deletions--which covers the last 9
hours. But we have many thousands of editors contributing every day.
For instance, of the last 500 edits, there were 287 unique usernames
or IPs.
There may be many editors involved in dealing with vandalism, but it's
a drop in the bucket compared to the resources we have available.
The deletion log will only show admins who are carrying out the
deletion. It won't show non-admins who are monitoring recent changes,
manually reverting vandalism, and tagging speedies. It doesn't make
sense to compare the number of admins performing deletetions to recent
changes by everyone.
I also don't know how to interpret what the IRC numbers mean ... right
now there are 32 people in #wikipedia-en, but I'm certain there are many
more editors than that active right now.