Hi Jan,
There are many issues involved in power dynamics. I would prefer to look at this issue from a wide angle perspective.
How do you define "community health"?
Are the people who have power competent and focused on public service, are they incompetent and selfish, or some other combination of those factors?
There are also powerful non-community forces such as paid editors who have conflicts of interest, nations which make legal and political decisions that affect the community, trolls, political activists, WMF, and more. These can have significant effects for better and for worse. I suggest that you take these into your account in analyzing power dynamics.
I also suggest taking into account that even if someone is high on the power curve, that doesn't mean that they are necessarily having a good time at others' expense. I think that some people such as English Wikipedia functionaries are sometimes under a lot of stress, and are subject to criticism and scrutiny from many directions. Also, there may be good reasons for not distributing power more widely in some cases, such as with the Checkuser tool.
I worry that someday the community will be overwhelmed by organizations and/or nations which want to alter Wikimedia content for selfish reasons and who can afford to hire or manipulate large numbers of people into doing what they want.
What is the goal of your research?
Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 10:31 AM Jan Dittrich jan.dittrich@wikimedia.de wrote:
Hello Researchers,
Contribution patterns in online communities follow a power distribution which is known as the 1% rule [1], as Wikipedia told me.
However, the steepness of the distribution can be more or less strong: 50% of your edits could be contributed by 2% or by 0.002%, the latter showing a stronger imbalance.
I wonder if there are any estimates/rules-of-thumb of what imbalance is problematic when seen from the perspective of community health.
I also wonder if there is research on how technology contributes to such imbalances and how it might be mitigated – e.g training, user-friendliness, documentation… (based on my assumption that a steep curve is less desirable, since the power is more concentrated, the system more fragile and the redistribution of power more constrained)
Jan
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
-- Jan Dittrich UX Design/ Research
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