Since they are doing an entirely voluntary job, they would probably have nothing to go on strike for, but if all admins stopped contributing, the site would fall apart. Just a hypothetical idea, and I can't really be bothered writing much here, but what do you think would happen to Wikipedia if all admins were to stop editing tomorrow?

They'd either promote all the wannabe admins, or if they all went on strike, I assume they'd lock the site down so nothing could be changed or added.

In any case, I'm on strike myself. I haven't edited with my admin account for nearly a month now.

Hey you closed the Encyclopedia Dramatica AfD on 19th of May. That was a pretty adminny thing to do (and not in a bad way.)

Logically, if all admins went on strike, that would mean all of Wikipedia's various factions and philosophical groups, including the top dog admins, were deeply dissatisfied with something. That's impossible, because they couldn't all be that dissatisfied; if something angered one group so severely, another group would relish it. Furthermore, since this would also mean all the people in a position to enforce or impose changes would be on strike, there'd be no one left to address the demands made by the strikers.

Were that to happen (and the only logical way it might would be if some cyber-bio-virus attached itself to the Admin toolkit and literally annihilated every admin), Wikipedia would soon look a lot like Usenet.

At first it seems like a silly question or an impossibility. But suppose there where no admins? Maybe an admin rapture like the one that took most the honey bees away? The same question really. What if a wiki was organized with only software permitting the creation and elimination of content and detailed edit history without any particular preference in permissions or tools among users? Or even more to the point what if a wiki, already possessing a huge quantity of content, was reorganized along similar lines.

My first thought is that it would devolve and constrict, as vandalism and removal would be easier to achieve than the creation of content. This would amplify as this environment would deter productive editors. These are just some thoughts off the hip. It might be useful as a thought experiment to pursue this more.

Of course this could be done in actual fact. Simply fork WP and just walk away without establishing any access other than ordinary user.

Been there, done that.

Heaven Forbid!

Well, just for one example, if FellatiousMonkey went on strike the world would be missing out on such irreplaceable contributions to the Sump Of Humongous Knowledge as this.
Civilization Itself Would Come To A Grinding Halt!

Jon

I also meant to include vandal-fighters in my original post.

Yeah, if the vandal-fighters and admins stopped editing, and no new ones came along, and it wasn't locked down, how long would it take for Wikipedia to become unusable? An hour? A day? A week? A month? A year?

I guess it would depend on how many wikignomes do the job.

There is certainly a whole load of administrative nonsense that nobody would miss, but perhaps that is the top of the admin iceberg that we see, and we forget how dependent the wiki model is on desperate paddling beneath the surface (to mix a metaphor horribly!).

Back in the 80s I worked on a batch transaction system that had a problem with it. It took a senior person about half a day to resolve the problems - and that person enjoyed the hero status of resolving the problems so was never motivated to put in any changes. A new manager took over the product, saw the drain on resources and we soon identified that 95% of the actions were contention issues that simply needed retrying, and the 5% were real problems. Simply by recycling the failed transactions once, we got rid of 95% of the errors, and regained a senior analyst (who never forgave me for her demotion from hero overhead to useful employee).

I think that lesson is obvious here: we suspect 95% of the admin work is reverting mindless vandalism of anonymous editors. I recall at one time there was an analysis that suggested anonymous IPs did good work and therefore blocking would be harmful, yet I suspect that forcing IPs to have accounts would not mean that all the IP editors would give up because they could not be bothered to register an account.

Anyway, Dogbiscuit's diagnostic for the day:

On Columbus Day of last year, the flagship article of the WikiClique on ID — the main article on Intelligent Design — was the Featured Article of the day. I am not exaggerating when I say that 99.9% of edits by first-time onlookers were either blatant vandalism or earnest edits that objectively degraded the quality of the article.

During the entire day, I observed exactly one newcomer who made a meaningful improvement to the article, but only half of his suggested improvement survived the knee-jerk reverts of any and all non-WP:OWN edits that strange day. I sent Dave Souza a note urging him to correct the remaining detail, but (for reasons unbeknownst to me) Dave never responded.