This page in a nutshell: The s-index (or sysop index) is an attempt to quantify sysop activity, where s is the number of sysops who took at least s administrator actions in a given period. You probably want to look at the graphs. |
The number of enWiki sysops has been in a steady decline for years. It is a recurring topic at WT:RFA, a common thread in RfA reform proposals, and has been extensively covered at the Signpost and elsewhere; many causes and solutions have been offered and discussed. The s-index is a metric for assessing the activity of the entire corps of sysops. It is analogous to the h-index for academics, which "attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications
" of an academic, measuring the number of papers h with at least h citations. An h-index of five means the author has five papers that have been cited at least five times each, while an h-index of 11 means the author has published 11 with at least 11 citations.[1] The intent of the h-index is to measure both output and impact, not just quantity of either. In essence, the s-index treats enWiki as the scholar, with each sysop as a paper and logged actions as each sysop's "citation" count. A similar metric used in cycling is the Eddington number.
The code for this project pulls each month's data from XTools' AdminStats and processes those values. It then calculates the s-index for the specified option, and graphs it using R. The idea is to observe how the project's s-index has changed and is changing over time, hopefully to provide some context. Below are a number of these graphs, each looking at a different range of data. The monthly graphs show the s-index for each month, while the annual graphs show the s-index for each full calendar year (i.e. through 2017). The rolling graphs show a rolling lookback for a specific number of months at a time, e.g. "rolling 3mos" shows the s-index for the each three-month period available. Each graph shows the s-index both with and without bots, and a LOESS regression is also shown over the data. An identical graph also exists for each that shows the total number of admin actions in that period.