Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 7, numbers 1 and 2, 2014 // View article
Authors:
Justyna Spychała
Mateusz Adamczyk
Piotr Turek
Keywords: Multidimensional Behavioral Social Network; Wikipedia; Request for Adminship; Clustering Coefficient; Administrators' Lifespans; Administrator Community versus core; Wikipedia's users behavioural patterns
Abstract:
Administrators of Wikipedia are its most dedicated users, which are granted special privileges and burdened with great responsibility for the Wikipedia. The administrators are usually nominated by the community and then elected by voting or by reaching a consensus. This paper examines period 2005 – 2011. In most recent years of examined period, decline in a number of newly appointed administrators can be observed. There are two main hypotheses of seen phenomena: with growth of Wikipedia it is harder to become an administrator or existing administrator community is shutting out new candidates due to acquaintance relation. This research is an attempt to find out whether the community is not becoming less open to new users and new potential administrators, because of their lack of chances to gain reputation. The key here is the understanding of social aspects driving the process of Request for Adminship (RfA) votings. Based on our previous work focused on social networks induced from collective activity of wikipedians, this paper extends it by the annual analysis of obtained statistics and examination of clustering coefficient as an approximation of social capital. We present the dynamics of relationships between voters and candidates across several years of Polish Wikipedia development. Obtained data allowed us to answer the question, whether administrator community of Polish Wikipedia shuts out new candidates because of the acquaintance relation.
Pages: 103 to 112
Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2014. Used with permission.
Publication date: June 30, 2014
Published in: journal
ISSN: 1942-2679