Milos,
for some reason this thread fell off my radar but you're raising some very interesting questions that as far as I know haven't been systematically addressed in the literature. There are papers on what drives the selection of admins or users with special privileges (the latest one from a group of researchers based in Warsaw titled "Social Mechanism of Granting Trust Basing on Polish Wikipedia Requests for Adminship", to be presented at SocInfo '11), but how privilege awarding affects motivation/participation in Wikipedia is a relatively unexplored field as far as I know.
May I suggest that you put together a research page on Meta with this list of questions? The research index is currently used as a place for researchers to present their projects but it should also become a place for the community to formulate questions that haven't been studied yet (or if they have, to link to existing research).
Dario
On Aug 22, 2011, at 4:45 AM, Milos Rancic wrote:
On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 13:35, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
- Loosing special permissions demotivates editors. (I am here
particularly interested in temporary admins of smaller wikis who didn't show up the second time to ask for temp adminship again.)
I have a personal experience here, since I was a temporary admin on Lak Wikipedia for I believe two months (it must be smth like end of 2008). There was no community (and there is still no community), but we (three users who did not speak any Lak) tried to reach out to Lak speakers on some discussion forums. I felt that first the Wikipedia should be cleaned up (logo uploaded, vandalism removed etc), and asked for the temporary adminship (first refused by Angela who did not read my request properly, and then done by another steward - she never conceded or apologized). Once it was done, I did not feel any motivation to extend my adminship, though I am still regular on that wiki, visiting it at least every second day. In these three years, I had several occasions which required a sysop intervention, and then I put the delete template or asked stewards. I think many temporary sysop cases are like mine.
There are temporary admins among native speakers now, as the requirement now is to have ~5 active users to get permanent permissions. For example, two Navajo Wikimedians were waiting for almost two years to get permanent admin permissions.
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