User:Pppery/The iceberg

The common wisdom of the community is that you are not irreplaceable and that everything will get done just as well if individual contributors leave or are banned. This wisdom is, in my experience, wrong and dangerous.

2024 example

This section was written in July 2024, and reflects the way areas were structured at the time. The same general concepts should still hold at any time, but who does what has of course shifted slightly since.

Consider what were to happen if I (User:Pppery) were to stop editing Wikipedia, either of my own volition or if I were to get desysopped and banned:

• Lots of other people would definitely take up doing lots of the central things I do, like periodically reviewing WP:Criteria for speedy deletion, answering questions at WP:Help desk or WP:Village pump (technical), or closing deletion discussions. The backlog would probably be longer there.
• The bus factor of various more obscure venues like WP:Requests for history merge, clearing Category:Articles with broken excerpts, or WT:Categories for discussion/Working, would drop, in some cases as low as from 3 to 2 or 2 to 1. There was a time in March 2024 when I stopped working at the latter venue and the result was a huge pile-up, which I later handled near-singlehandedly for much of April 2024.
• Various things that apparently I am the only active person to care about at all, like user category monitoring (User:Pppery/User category report / https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/48525), looking at recent changes to MediaWiki namespace pages, etc. will just not get done.
• Finally, various things that most of the community agrees should be done, but nobody other than me is willing to do, would largely not get done. Like monitoring MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist, where before I got involved requests were languishing for a month and then being archived without reply, patrolling the deletion log for out-of-process deletions (WP:Database reports/Possibly out-of-process deletions), looking for articles created evading salts at alternate titles (https://public-paws.wmcloud.org/46222050/Salt%20Evasion.ipynb), I'm not saying this to boast about how essential I am to Wikipedia's functioning, but to use myself as an example for the point below.

Every regular editor's activities have this iceberg structure, where some of what they do is working toward a common and well-staffed pool, and various other parts are obscure and unwanted personal itches, and various parts are obscure but wanted thankless tasks that nobody else happens to have the knowledge and ability to do.

And you often don't know what that last bullet point of the iceberg for another editor is. From my experience as an onlooker or occasional participant, when the community moves for a regular editor to be banned, or for an active admin to be desysopped for what seems to me like relatively minor misconduct, they don't seem to realize this, and how they will often unwittingly cause important neglected tasks to be undone.

October 2024 update

So, I resigned adminship in August 2024. Since then:

• There have been several complaints on Discord about history merges not being done. However, Category:Candidates for history merging has eight entries, with the oldest one being three days old. That's actually better than I expected it would be.
• MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist has an open request dating back 6 weeks, and several even older requests were only handled very recently. I admittedly wasn't great at responding promptly to everything in my time there, but I would have approved the request in days at most.
• WP:Categories for discussion has reached the point where there is only one regular closer, and pretty much every discussion in which they're involved ends up getting listed at WP:Closure requests
• And that's only admin tasks, and things I can easily point to as not being done. There's a lot of stuff that I probably would have done if I had remained an admin that I don't even know about

The spam whitelist is a particularly striking situation - it was originally being handled near-singlehandedly by User:Beetstra, and then when their activity significantly decreased requests started being archived unanswered, despite the archiving period being increased twice. While I eventually stepped up to the plate there (despite arguably breaching a promise I made in my RfA to stay away from content-related actions), we should try to avoid intentionally introducing that sort of close call.

February 2025 update

Witness the size of the backlog at WP:Files for discussion, which is rapidly approaching a month. This is something that Fastily used to handle, and the chaos is, in an entirely predictable manner, building up.

I poked my head in that area again in early April, and found that in the entire period from Wikipedia:Files for discussion/2025 March 1 to Wikipedia:Files for discussion/2025 March 31 the same admin had closed all but two of the closed discussions (ignoring speedy deletions, withdrawals, and other trivial cases).

Past incidents where one person leaving threw a process into disarray

(This list is very incomplete, other editors are welcome to add more entries)

• Phabricator translations stopped being updated when MModell stopped working for the WMF
• Article history templates stopped being maintained when Gimmetrow left
• The sole active admin of the Amharic Wikipedia was desysopped and banned for homophobia, leaving the project, which had refused global sysops, with no active admins.