Research:Active administrator

An active administrator is a user who has the administrator user right and has made at least one administrative action during a given month.

Administrative action

The purpose of designating administrators is to give trusted users access to sensitive tools. Therefore, the best measure of whether a user is actively administrating a project is whether they are using those tools. Ideally, this metric would count the full set of administrative actions at every wiki, but since that's technically difficult, a good approximation is to count four particularly important action types that are recorded in the logs:

• deleting and undeleting pages
• blocking and unblocking users and IP addresses
• protecting and unprotecting pages
• changing user groups/rights

These correspond to four values of log_type: block, protect, delete, and rights. However, these log types include a few specific actions (log_action) that can be done by non-administrators, which need to be excluded:

• delete_redir: deleting a redirect by moving onto it the page that it redirected to
• move_prot: moving a protected page, which regular users can do for semi-protected pages
• autopromote: a user was automatically promoted into a group after reaching an edit or time threshold (as with autoconfirmation)

Administrator status

There are a few cases were the administrative log actions listed above can be done by non-administators.

First, there are global maintainers, like stewards and global deleters. Second, some wikis have non-admin user groups that have limited powers to change the groups of other users. For example, event coordinators on the English Wikipedia can give other users confirmed status and license reviewers on Commons can make other users license reviewers.

Therefore, it's ideal to count only users doing administrative actions who were actually in the administrator user group at the time of the action (the user group is sometimes removed when an administrator resigns or becomes inactive). However, this is technically difficult and a 2019 analysis found that adding this qualification, as opposed to simply counting users who did administrative actions, would make only a very minor improvement to the metric.