There have been quite a few papers analyzing RfAs (mostly) on the
English Wikipedia, see e.g.:
- this also contains citations of earlier research on the topic.
And the authors of the present paper already published another one
about Polish Wikipedia RfAs in 2011:
On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga
<tom(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Abstract:
Wikipedia admins are editors entrusted with special privileges and
duties, responsible for the community management of Wikipedia. They
are elected using a special procedure defined by the Wikipedia
community, called Request for Adminship (RfA). Because of the growing
amount of management work (quality control, coordination, maintenance)
on the Wikipedia, the importance of admins is growing. At the same
time, there exists evidence that the admin community is growing more
slowly than expected. We present an analysis of the RfA procedure in
the Polish-language Wikipedia, since the procedure’s introduction in
2005. With the goal of discovering good candidates for new admins that
could be accepted by the community, we model the admin elections using
multidimensional behavioral social networks derived from the Wikipedia
edit history. We find that we can classify the votes in the RfA
procedures using this model with an accuracy level that should be
sufficient to recommend candidates. We also propose and verify
interpretations of the dimensions of the social network. We find that
one of the dimensions, based on discussion on Wikipedia talk pages,
can be validly interpreted as acquaintance among editors, and discuss
the relevance of this dimension to the admin elections.
Link:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13278-012-0092-6
From the conclusion:
"[...] We have noticed the decreasing amount of successful admin
elections and have formulated two hypotheses that could explain this
phenomenon. Hypothesis A stated that new admins are elected on the
basis of acquaintance of the voter and candidate. If this would be a
valid explanation, we could conclude that the community of admins is
becoming increasingly closed, which would be detrimental to the
sustainable development of the Wikipedia.
Hypothesis B stated that new admins are elected on the basis of
similarity of experience in editing various topics of the voter and
candidate. Since voters are other active admins whose experience
increases with time, their thresholds of accepting a candidate are
likely to increase (as has been observed from the simple statistics of
RfA votings)."
I would love to see this research on other Wikipedias.
Tom
--
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more
useful than a life spent doing nothing."
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