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.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13278-012-0092-6
Seria legal para a lusófona, não?
Tom
Da conclusão:
[...] "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)."
Tom
wikimediabr-l@lists.wikimedia.org