I was having a chat on msn just now:



And I thought - if I named the top ten thorn-in-my-side vandal fighting admins I've come across, none but Cyde are still active, and him only barely. Those like Curps, Chanting Fox, Cryptoderk (he of the first vandal fighter), Lupin (similar provenence with popups), Lucky 6.9, etc, are all just distant memories. Many other admins have simply given up on vandal fighting to concentrate on other things.

This attrition rate does not generalise to all Wikipedia admins. There must be something about vandal fighting that wears Wikipedia admins out*. Thus vandalising becomes even more rewarding. And in this remaining week whilst I still have the time, I shall be doing a lot more of it.

*Alternative hypothesis: It is much easier to become an admin through recent change watching than through genuinely constructive edits, and so users who become admins through this route are probably less committed in the first place.

lol but you are , despite your name, repentant so it doesn't matter.

I am occasionally repentant, but not for vandalism. Sometimes I'm irritated I've committed enough vandalism that there's no prosepect of my getting on Wikipedia to make a certain "point", but that doesn't make me repentant, it just means I've tossed a coin and lost.

Burnout rates are high in general. I have personally never found fighting vandalism to be taxing, and when you have a rollback button it's so easy it becomes kind of like a sport, and you feel like you're in competition with the other vandal fighters to see who can get them first. You're giving yourself way too much credit.

If you're not vandal-fighting but editing on a wiki then you have to keep watch on all your edits for the rest of your life in case someone undoes them.

This is a pretty ridiculous exaggeration. Do you actually edit Wikipedia? Personally, I quit using my watchlist a long time ago. Once it got to about 6,000 pages, it started freezing up for a while every time I'd try to look at it, so I just quit using it altogether, and I'm glad I did. It's a needless hassle to watch everything like that. Anything I really care about, I check up on it periodically, but normally there's no need.