Modeling Wikipedia admin elections using multidimensional behavioral social networks

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.

Creating the sustainable conditions for knowledge information sharing in virtual community

“…For example, Yang and Lai ( 2010 ) investigated the motivations of Wikipedia content contributors. Some literature investigated the relationships between users on Wikipedia (Jankowski-Lorek et al 2013 ; Ermann et al 2013 ; Li et al 2012 ; Silva et al 2011 ). For example, Silva et al ( 2011 ) investigated the relationships within and between category networks in Wikipedia.…”

Personal vs. know-how contacts: which matter more in wiki elections?

“…Results show that strong edit history, edit summaries and wide-ranging experience of a candidate such as a user interaction contribute to the success of a candidate in the online elections. New admins of Wikipedia are discovered by modeling admin elections (Jankowski-Lorek et al 2013). Wikipedia edit history is used in this study and classification of votes is done to select candidates for adminship.…”

“…Elections can be of different kinds spanning from local to global e.g. General election (Burnap et al 2016), Senate election (Smith and Gustafson 2017), Parliamentary election (Smith and Gustafson 2017), and Wikipedia election (Jankowski-Lorek et al 2013). The election related activities performed by voters (Bode et al 2014) and candidates (Brady et al 2017) can predict forthcoming results.…”

Social Interactions vs Revisions, What Is Important for Promotion in Wikipedia?

“…And the probability of a positive vote, with an accuracy of 84%, is function of the intensity of the voter's relations (i.e. co-editions, discussions, co-revert 1 ) with the candidate (Jankowski- Lorek et al, 2013). Closer to what we want to study here, Burke and Kraut (2008) proposed a model to predict RfA results according to the criteria put forward by the Guide to RfAs 2 , where are described the criteria RfA evaluators look for in nominees, mainly based on accounting candidate's activity: Strong edit history, with Edit summaries (explaining what they did when editing), and High quality of articles, Varied experience, User interaction, Helping with chores (i. e. already working on admin tasks such as discussing articles for delation), Trustworthiness, Observing consensus, and having various experiences in terms of editing, user interaction, etc.…”