[WikiEN-l] The general population & AfD

[Gwern Branwen]

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 9:19 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a nicely competent paper.  Thanks for the heads up!  SJ

Re-reading, I'm not sure I understand what the results mean. To
continue the above quote:

> Participants recruited by keep !voters were about four times less likely to support deletion as those recruited by delete !voters. The participants that bots recruited also appear unlikely to support deletion, which reflects the policy bias we observed earlier.
>
> To see what effect participant recruitment has on decision quality, we introduce four binary variables: BotRecruit, NomRecruit, DeleteRecruit, and KeepRecruit. These variables indicate whether a bot, the AfD nominator, a delete !voter, or a keep !voter successfully recruited somebody to the group, respectively.
>
> Looking back to table 1, we find that regardless of the decision, none of the first three variables has a statistically significant effect. On the other hand, when a keep !voter recruited someone to the discussion, we see a significant effect: delete decisions are more likely to be reversed.

So:

1. people recruited by a !keep voter (KeepRecruit) also tend to vote !keep
2. people recruited by a !delete voter (DeleteRecruit) tend neither
way, both !delete and !keep
    2.5. likewise for people recruited (NomRecruit) by the nominator
(almost always a !delete voter, obviously)
3. people recruited by a bot (BotRecruit), like 2 & 2.5, have no
'statistically significant effect'

This is a little troubling for anyone who wants to argue that deleting
fewer articles is the will of the people - the BotRecruits should then
have been more likely to be !keepers.

>     We offer two possible explanations: the first is that recruitment by keep !voters, biased as it may appear, is a sign of positive community interest, and suggests that the article should be kept. If the community decides otherwise and deletes the article, then decision quality suffers. An alternative explanation is that keep !voter recruitment is a sign of activism among those who prefer to keep the article. These proponents may be especially persistent in maintaining the article’s existence in Wikipedia, even if it requires working to reverse a delete decision."

Obviously I prefer the first interpretation. With that one, the story
becomes an article in an obscure niche is put for deletion by a
boorish deletionist; in come the specialists who are not ignorant of
the topic and literature and save it. If I saw an anime article that
should not be deleted up for deletion, I wouldn't ask random
Wikipedians to help, I'd go to what pass for anime experts on
Wikipedia like Timothy Perper, who can look through the academic
literature and have better access to media both English and Japanese.
Looks like bias, smells like homophily, but really just the system
working.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net