Both hypotheses don't really apply to the English language Wikipedia.

Hypothesis A assumes that people vote for candidates who they are familiar with. There is some truth in that, and it is true of small tightly knit communities such as the Georgian Wikipedia. But in larger and or less tightly knit communities such as Commons or the English language Wikipedia it is only a small part of the picture. It would be more accurate to say that many candidates have fans and foes who will turn up at their RFA. That's one reason why some contentious RFAs can get very high participation, and occasionally a high profile candidate can get a very large amount of support. But to be closed the community would have to be opposing candidates simply because they are unfamiliar with them. What actually happens is that most votes for or against are instances where before the RFA the candidate was unfamiliar to the voter, and the voter judges the candidate according to what they say in the RFA, what others and especially the nominator say in the RFA, and of course some look at the candidates contributions. My suspicion is that only a small minority of voters thoroughly check the candidates contributions, but those who do have enormous influence in the RFA , especially those who find well founded reasons to Oppose. When an RFA that was heading for success suddenly tanks it is usually because someone has found something problematic in the candidate's contributions and written a well argued oppose or question that changes the mood of the RFA.

But it is still normal on EN Wiki for an RFA to take place where most of the supporters are people who the candidate would not consider "Wikifriends" or even remember having encountered before. That was the case with my own RFAs and for most if not all of the candidates who I have nominated.

Hypothesis B assumes that the electorate are increasingly experienced admins, actually the majority of the voters are usually not admins, the most regular opposers include a number of non-admins, whilst some of the most consistent supporters are admins who worry about the admin shortage. My experience is that the four main electorates are:

Wannabees - people considering a run themselves. Such voters tend to oppose people who they consider clearly less qualified than they intend to be when they run, but are very supportive of candidates as qualified as they expect to be by the time they run.

Friends and Foes. People who are familiar with the candidate and who will support or oppose based on their experience of them. Some of these voters will be admins.

Experienced non-admins with no plans to run again at RFA. There are a number of RFA regulars who know that they couldn't pass RFA themselves and who are very wary as to who gets the power to block them or delete their work. In particular this includes "content contributors" who oppose candidates who don't have a strong record of writing encyclopaedia articles, frank speakers who oppose anyone they suspect of becoming a "civility policeman" and even editors who oppose candidates who they deem to be too close to the WMF.

Voters in contentious RFAs. Lots of longterm editors keep an eye on the noticeboard that lists current RFAs and their support percentages. Marginal RFAs attract extra scrutiny, RFAs that are near unanimous are less worth spending time on.

Regards

WSC

On 18 February 2013 17:30, Everton Zanella Alvarenga tom@wikimedia.orgwrote:

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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