There have been quite a few papers analyzing RfAs (mostly) on the English Wikipedia, see e.g.:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2012/March#How_editors_evaluate_each_other:_effects_of_status_and_similarity https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2012/January#Students_predict_connections_between_Wikipedians https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2011/September#How_social_ties_influence_admin_votes - this also contains citations of earlier research on the topic. And the authors of the present paper already published another one about Polish Wikipedia RfAs in 2011: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2011/October#What_it_takes_to_become_an_admin:_Insights_from_the_Polish_Wikipedia On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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." > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Tilman Bayer Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications) Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
