No subject

> Status change. Wikipedians can be promoted to administrator status throug=
h a public election, and almost always after extensive prior involvement in=
 the community. Since we track the communications of editors over time, we =
can examine how linguistic coordination behavior changes when a Wikipedian =
becomes an =E2=80=9Cadmin=E2=80=9D. To our knowledge, our study is the firs=
t to analyze the effects of status change on specific forms of language use=
.

> Users are promoted to admins through a transparent election process known=
 as requests for adminship4 , or RfAs, where the community decides who will=
 become admins. Since RfAs are well documented and timestamped, not only do=
 we have the current status of editors, we can also extract the exact time =
when editors underwent role changes from non-admins to admins.
> Textual exchanges. Editors on Wikipedia interact on talk pages5 to discus=
s changes to article or project pages. We gathered 240,436 conversational e=
xchanges carried out on the talk pages, where the participants of these (as=
ynchonous) discussions were associated with rich status and social interact=
ion information: status, timestamp of status change if there is one, as wel=
l as activity level on talk pages, which can serve as a proxy of their soci=
ability, or how socially inclined they are. In addition, there is a discuss=
ion phase during RfAs, where users =E2=80=9Cgive their opinions, ask questi=
ons, and make comments=E2=80=9D over an open nomination. Candidates can rep=
ly to existing posts during this time. We also extracted conversations that=
 occurred in RfA discussions, and obtained a total of 32,000 conversational=
 exchanges. Most of our experiments were carried out on the larger dataset =
extracted from talk pages, unless otherwise noted. (The dataset will be dis=
tributed publicly.)

> We measure the linguistic style of a person by their usage of function wo=
rds that have little lexical meaning, thereby marking style rather than con=
tent. For consistency with prior work, we employed the nine LIWC-derived ca=
tegories [36] deemed to be processed by humans in a generally non-conscious=
 fashion [25]. The nine categories are: articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunct=
ions, high-frequency adverbs, impersonal pronouns, negations, personal pron=
ouns, prepositions, and quanti-
fiers (451 lexemes total).

Results, starting page 5:

> ...communication behavior on Wikipedia provides evidence for hypothesis P=
target : users coordinate more toward the (higher-powered) admins than towa=
rd the non-admins (Figure 1(a)12 ).
> In the other direction, however, when comparing admins and non-admins as =
speakers, the data provides evidence that is initially at odds with Pspeake=
r : as illustrated in Figure 1(b), admins coordinate to other people more t=
han non-admins do (while the hypothesis predicted that they would coordinat=
e less).13 We now explore some of the subtleties underlying this result, sh=
owing how it arises as a superposition of two effects.

> One possible explanations for the inconsistency of our observations with =
Pspeaker is the effect of personal characteristics suggested in Hypothesis =
B from Section 2. Specifically, admin status was not conferred arbitrarily =
on a set of users; rather, admins are those people who sought out this high=
er status and succeeded in achieving it. It is thus natural to suppose that=
, as a group, they may have distinguishing individual traits that are refle=
cted in their level of language coordination.
>
> ...to investigate whether the effects observed in Figure 1(b) are purely =
tied to status, we look at communication differences between these same two=
 populations over time periods when there was no status difference between =
them: we compare the set of admins-to-be =E2=80=94 future admins before the=
y were promoted via their RfA =E2=80=94 with non-admins. Figure 2(a) shows =
that the same differences in language coordination were already present in =
these two populations =E2=80=94 hence, they are not an effect of status alo=
ne, since they were visible before the former population ever achieved its =
increase in status.

> One way to separate the second issue from the first is to look at differe=
nces in coordination between users who were promoted (admins-to-be), and th=
ose who went through the RfA process but were denied admin status (failed-t=
o-be). Both admins-to-be and failed-to-be had the ambition to become admins=
, but only members of the former group were successful. We investigate coor=
dination differnces between these two groups during a period when their adm=
inship ambitions are arguably most salient: during the discussions in each =
user=E2=80=99s own RfA process. Figure 2(b) shows that even in the conversa=
tions they had on their RfA pages, the admins-to-be were coordinating more =
to the others than the failed-to-be, providing evidence for a strong form o=
f Hypothesis B.
>
> ... it is interesting to note that the most dramatic change in coordinati=
on is visible in the second month after the change in status occurred. This=
 suggests a period of accommodation to the newly gained status, both for th=
e person that undergoes the change and for those witnessing it.

> To study Pspeaker, we create two populations for comparison: the interact=
ions of each admin before his or her promotion via RfA (i.e., when they wer=
e admins-to-be), and the interactions of each admin after his or her respec=
tive promotion. Figure 3(a) shows how the resulting comparison confirms Psp=
eaker : admins-to-be decrease their level of coordination once they gain po=
wer.14 Interestingly, the reverse seems to be true for failed-to-be: after =
failing in their RfAs =E2=80=94 an event that arguably reinforces their fai=
lure to achieve high status in the community =E2=80=94 they coordinate more=
 (p-value 0.05; we omit the figure due to space limitations.)

So, suck-ups tend to pass RfA more often than those who don't suck up
to whom they are talking to. An interesting analysis, altogether.

--=20
gwern
http://www.gwern.net