On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 11:03 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
I would really like to have some work about people with special
permissions on Wikimedia projects (starting with rollbacker, then
admins etc.): is retention different than with regular users? if so,
how? did some policies have impact on behavior of those users; if so,
which? do Wikimedians with special permissions influence development
of wiki and how (just in broader sense, of course)? which
recommendations could be given based on statistical data? is it
possible and how if possible to have real-time analysis of the trends?
if possible, a tool would be needed; and so on.
Not a lot of information outside of statistical analysis would be
needed, so it wouldn't require extra organizational efforts initially.
The initial target would be small wikis and all of them are
standardized by stewards. In future it would be good to have such
research on all Wikimedia wikis.
So, the only issue is to find a researcher who would be willing to do
that. I would mentor such researcher and I would connect him or her
with other relevant Wikimedians, if necessary. I don't how how the
process related to the finding researcher and mentoring him goes, but
I suppose that Dario has clue :)
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Hey Milos,
This is the kind of thing the summer researchers in the Community Dept. might be able to whip up pretty easily. Are you interested in all special permissions, or just certain ones?
Getting different rates of retention for these permissions groups is relatively easy. Answering "do Wikimedians with special permissions influence development of wiki and how" is more qualitative and would take time to do comprehensively, though I think we know the answer is that admins in particular have an enormous impact on retention of other groups. As for groups like rollbacker, I would think that they have a slight but perhaps still measurably different impact, primarily because getting reverted with an impersonal explanation has a distinctly negative impact on whether people stick around or not. My theories aside, different permissions require their own individual analysis.
I agree that working with a smaller wiki (and thus a smaller dataset) would be a good place to start, not least of which because it's likely that if there is a disproportionate impact from people with special userrights, the effect would be amplified on a smaller project.
We currently have one researcher tasked with starting analysis of Portuguese Wikipedia, which though it's quite old/mature has only 30ish admins. I think I'll ask him to work on this kind of analysis soon...
--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation