How many actions by administrators does it take to clean up spam?
Administrators clean up the messes left by other editors. The time and effort spent by admins is a key to building and maintaining quality of the encyclopedia. Among the actions they take are blocking other editors, deleting articles, and protecting articles from vandalism. MER-C has collected the data for these and other admin actions taken in 2019, mostly on the English language Wikipedia (enWiki). See github for his methodology and this page for the raw data.
While the descriptive statistics themselves may be of interest, especially to administrators, our main purpose in examining them is to explore the burden that spam places on admins. Spam is not identical to paid editing – for example, an unpaid fan of an entertainer might wish to post the website of the entertainer's fanclub on dozens of pages. We believe, however, that most spam is inserted by editors, including paid editors, with a more serious conflict of interest.
As a rough indication of importance of spam to admins, we summed the number of blocks, deletions, and protections related to various wiki-offenses on enWiki. Using an open proxy had the highest total actions for 2019 (387,984), spam has the second highest total (81,699), followed by vandalism (68,039) and sockpuppeting/long term abuse (46,029). Not all admin actions require the same amount of time or dedication – discovering and blocking open proxies may be fairly simple or automatic and it is difficult to compare the time required for the three other major wiki-offenses. But as a first approximation this simple measure lets us know that spam is one of the most frequent problems for admins.