What 20 million bans reveal about the strain on Wikipedia’s volunteers

Wikipedia's volunteer administrators are buckling under an unsustainable workload. According to research from the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst, the site has issued over twenty million bans—a stark indicator of the pressure on a dwindling pool of volunteer moderators. As Wikipedia's content grows, fewer volunteers are stepping up to maintain it, leaving the remaining administrators overwhelmed by mounting vandalism and abuse while facing persistent burnout.

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