[editional]

While a shortage of admins/editors w/could cause the death of rather niche entries, Wikipedia would still have a huge propaganda outlet potential. Whether you believe its being actively used or not, wiki entries that might have political influence (history) will stay active, thus keeping Wikipedia (barely, that is) alive.

[WereSpielCheqrs]

Perhaps I should have made it clearer in the article, but the English Wikipedia is not really short of editors. There was an era of decline from 2007 to 2014, though much of that was a side effect of edit filters that rejected certain edits that were highly likely to be vandalism. But the 2015 rally in editing numbers has turned into a sort of plateau - editing from 2015 to 2023 has consistently been above the 2014 minima. This is looking at "time between edits" How long it takes for each ten million edits.

[jp57]

The numbers in the OP indicated that few new editors are being added, so even if it’s not short of editors now, it will be eventually, unless new editors are added or there’s some breakthrough in longevity research.

[WereSpielCheqrs]

No. The article is about admins. Very few new editors are becoming admins, and my fear is that a Wikigeneration gap is emerging between the admins and the active editors. New editors are starting, old ones leaving or dying, total volume of editing is higher now than it was in the 2014 minima. But the number of admins is falling. Another way to look at the numbers is that if new admins continue to be promoted at the same rate as the last ten years, they would on average, need to be active as admins for fifty years each if you wanted to maintain current admin numbers.