Every symplectic Lie algebra with degenerate (including non-abelian nilpotent symplectic Lie algebras) has the structure of a quadratic extension. We give a standard model and describe the equivalence classes on the level of corresponding quadratic cohomology sets. Finally, we give a scheme to classify the isomorphism classes of symplectic Lie algebras with degenerate center. We also give a classification scheme for nilpotent symplectic Lie algebras and compute a complete list of all 6-dimensional nilpotent symplectic Lie algebras, which removes inaccuracies in an older list. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.