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

Abstract

The use of social media affects the real world as well. As an example, an election candidate's social media coverage can affect the chances of success. As an example, literature has identified that the same can be predicted by the online public discussions of online social network users about a candidate, besides the use of Twitter by a candidate himself. The contacts of a candidate in terms of number of online fans on Facebook, and number of followers on Twitter are found playing a vital role behind his success. Among many other forms of social media, Wikipedia is a very widely used channel. It is a freely available platform for writers all over the world where people can write and edit articles.Some of its users have more technical access for administration. Such users are selected by carrying out the nominating process in online public elections. The online election data are quite interesting in terms of being an emergent outcome of a large-scale self-organized opinion formation process. However, due to dynamical, and non-linear interactions and presence of mutual dependencies between election participants, the analysis of this data can be cumbersome using traditional statistical techniques. Also, the data of these elections are large and it is difficult to find the exact patterns in this data. For this purpose, social network analysis seems a better alternative for the identification of local and global patterns, locating influential nodes and the contacts behind their influence and examining social network dynamics. As a consequence, this study has to rely on specific social network measures to investigate the interactions between election participants and the importance of their contacts.It investigates whether personal contacts matter more than know-how contacts in wiki election nominations and voting participation by using standard tools such as Pajek and Gephi. It further evaluates the significance of a person's contacts in online wiki elections through a number of different graph-based influence identification methods. Additionally, the basic characteristics and cohesive groups in the wiki vote network are explored. This work contributes by discovering the significance of personal contacts over know-how contacts of a person in online elections. It is found that personal contacts, i.e. immediate neighbors (degree centrality) and neighborhood (k-neighbors) of a person have a positive effect on a person's nomination as an administrator and also contribute to the active participation of voters in voting. Moreover, know-how contacts, analyzed by means of measures such as betweenness and closeness centralities, have a relatively insignificant effect on the selection of a person. However, know-how contacts in terms of betweenness centrality for passing information in the network can positively contribute only to the voting process. These contacts also measured in terms of influence domain and PageRank can play a vital role in the selection of an admin.Additionally, such contacts in terms of reachability and br...

If I know you offline, I will vote for you online? The role of offline ties in an online public election

“…Several studies have previously researched voting behaviour on Wikipedia, most of them following a machine-learning paradigm (see e.g. Asim et al 2018;Burke and Kraut 2008;Leskovec et al 2010a;Graña 2014, 2017). This article will build up upon these previous lines of research, but it aims at explaining voting behaviour by adopting a sociological perspective.…”