I was an active Wikipedian back in the early days (2002-2006), and I ran for adminship twice, each time I was rejected for petty reasons. If you don't have a "p

I was an active Wikipedian back in the early days (2002-2006), and I ran for adminship twice, each time I was rejected for petty reasons. If you don't have a "perfect" account, they will pile on opposes. The only reason why so many people became admins at that time was that Wikipedia was still pretty much a "greenfield" site at the time (It had only around 700,000 articles back then, which is ~10% of what it is now), and there were plenty of volunteers signing up. Now it has become more established, and more rules have kept new generations out, similar to how boomers keep younger generations out of housing and high paying careers, despite having more education than them.