International Journal on Advances in Intelligent Systems, vol 7 no 1 & 2, year 2014, http://www.iariajournals.org/intelligent_systems/ 103 Does the Administrator Community of Polish Wikipedia Shut out New Candidates Because of the Acquaintance Relation? Justyna Spychała Mateusz Adamczyk Piotr Turek Faculty of Polish Studies Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics independent University of Warsaw University of Warsaw Warsaw, Poland Warsaw, Poland Warsaw, Poland Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Abstract—Administrators of Wikipedia are its most dedicated the case. Probably, it is caused by growing expectations about users, which are granted special privileges and burdened with new candidates. As the Polish Wikipedia grows, the number great responsibility for the Wikipedia. The administrators are of articles also grows. Articles are getting longer and more usually nominated by the community and then elected by voting complex. Users gain more experience and have richer edits or by reaching a consensus. This paper examines period 2005 – history. This paper contains some data and conclusions, which 2011. In most recent years of examined period, decline in Spychała et al. [1] were unable to present due to limitations a number of newly appointed administrators can be observed. There are two main hypotheses of seen phenomena: with growth placed on length of the conference publication. of Wikipedia it is harder to become an administrator or existing Administrators (or sysops) are very dedicated and trust- administrator community is shutting out new candidates due worthy participants of the Wikipedia projects in all language to acquaintance relation. This research is an attempt to find out whether the community is not becoming less open to new versions. Thanks to community decision, they have received users and new potential administrators, because of their lack of special privileges and use administrative tools to exercise chances to gain reputation. The key here is the understanding preventive and policing functions. Administrators have the of social aspects driving the process of Request for Adminship right to edit all the Wikipedia articles as well as many other (RfA) votings. Based on our previous work focused on social privileges—understood rather as duties. These powers are not networks induced from collective activity of wikipedians, this meant to give them editorial control over the project, but paper extends it by the annual analysis of obtained statistics rather provide mentoring and technical assistance in other and examination of clustering coefficient as an approximation of wikipedians’ work. Administrators also serve by providing social capital. We present the dynamics of relationships between assistance, especially to newcomers, in editing of Wikipedia. voters and candidates across several years of Polish Wikipedia All newly registered users get their guides—the administrators development. Obtained data allowed us to answer the question, whether administrator community of Polish Wikipedia shuts out to whom they can always turn for help and be sure they will new candidates because of the acquaintance relation. receive it as soon as possible. Keywords—Multidimensional Behavioral Social Network; Kittur et al. [4] claimed, that due to increasing amount Wikipedia; Request for Adminship; Clustering Coefficient; Ad- of management work at Wikipedia, such as content quality ministrators’ Lifespans; Administrator Community versus core; control, coordination, maintenance, that are caused by the Wikipedia’s users behavioural patterns. increasing popularity and amount of content in Wikipedia, the importance of administrators is increasing. This creates a I. INTRODUCTION potential risk that administrators may become overwhelmed by the amount of work and their response times become Spychała et al. [1] presented results of their research on longer. Especially, Ortega et al. [5] showed that after peak The Third International Conference on Advanced Collabora- of popularity of the Free Encyclopaedia, its user base growth tive Networks, Systems and Applications (COLLA 2013 [2]) slowed down. But in the same time, the amount of content is in Nice, France. Presented research concerned possibility of still increasing. If the Wikipedia is to keep its pace of growth, closing up the Administrator Community of Polish Wikipedia then some measures to increase its users base have to be taken. by shutting out new candidates. It was a refinement of work done by Turek et al. [3]. This paper is an extended version However, the Polish community of Administrators is grow- of paper written by Spychała et al. [1] and presented on ing slower than expected; hence, the question whether and COLLA 2013. Similarly to paper written by Spychała et al. [1], why this community shuts out candidates for new members. this paper covers the range of years 2005-2011 and its goal is Currently, there are 149 administrators on Polish Wikipedia— to answer the question if the reason for decrease in successful for comparison, 1,147 administrators work currently on the RfA votings in Polish Wikipedia is choosing Administrators English version. Of course, the English version is much more based on acquaintance. As the administrator community of developed, but sheer number of people with administrative Polish Wikipedia is rather small, especially compared to the privileges is impressive. On the other hand, Ortega et al. [5] English one, it could be valid claim. But, we argue that it is not notes that the Polish Wikipedia has the highest rate of auto- 2014, © Copyright by authors, Published under agreement with IARIA - www.iaria.org International Journal on Advances in Intelligent Systems, vol 7 no 1 & 2, year 2014, http://www.iariajournals.org/intelligent_systems/ 104 mated bots used to help administrators in their duties. This fact several papers. In one of them, Burke et al. [7] try to indicate can explain why the number of administrators is not enough the features and qualities determinative for the user selection to to prophesize doom of Polish Wikipedia. the position of administrator. On the basis of publicly available tips for candidates [8], a set of attributes, that a future admin- Administrators are elected in a special procedure, the rules istrator should have has been developed. Behavioural data and of which are clearly defined. This procedure is called Request comments, not page text, were used to evaluate candidates. for Adminship (RfA). As it was already mentioned, the privi- Authors counted each candidate’s edits in various namespaces leges for administrators are granted by Wikipedia community, (article, article talk, Wikipedia, Wikipedia talk, wiki projects, in a vote in which the right to vote is given to those Wikipedia etc.) to calculate total contribution as well as contribution users, who are well-known and respected members of the diversity. They also measured user interaction, mainly activity community and know and respect the established rules on the on talk pages, but also participation on arbitration or mediation website. Wikipedians who are candidates for the administrator committee pages and a few others. There are also several position must “have a minimum of 1,000 not deleted edits, other statistics, but the ones mentioned seemed to be the most first of which has to be made at least 3 months prior to the relevant to the candidate’s success. Especially successful were date of filing the candidacy”. Nominations for administrator candidates with strong edit diversity, mere edits in Wikipedia candidates are adopted by a special form on the web page articles did not add much more chance of success. In user that also contains the regulations and the list of candidates. interactions, article talk page edits were the best predictor New administrators are elected during a voting that lasts a of success, with other authors talk page edits being rather week (168 hours). Wikipedians, in order to be allowed to vote, poor. Burke et al. also confirmed Kittur’s [9] results that the must have been registered for at least one month and have a percentage of indirect work (coordination, discussion, etc.) minimum of 500 not deleted edits. grows over time, the share of articles in all Wikipedia edits Interestingly, in case of English version of Wikipedia, no is decreasing. formal conditions are required in order to declare a candidacy It is noteworthy that in Burke et al. [7] only the qualities for an administrator. The only conditions are possession of of each user were evaluated. Leskovec et al. [10] have shown an account and trust among other users. Despite this, the page that the outcome of the voting depends on the candidate and with the declaration forms contains the information that in case his or her place in the community. They found out that the of self-nominating, it is recommended to have at least 2,000 probability of one person’s vote to be positive is correlated edits for a minimum period of 3 months. Another important with the basic relative figures such as: who—voter or candidate difference is that in the case of English version of Wikipedia, has more edits, who has more barnstars (awards given by new administrators are elected not by voting, but by discussion. other Wikipedia users), the extent of collaboration of the two, Moreover, “the consensus in RFA is not achieved by exceeding etc. Authors strongly noted that the vote value (positive or a threshold, but by the strength of the justification of the negative) is not just a function of candidate, but both voter candidacy”. and candidate. There is one aspect of this paper which distinguishes Kittur et al. [11], analysed the impact of the similarity of it from work presented by Spychała et al. [1], namely our users on their mutual assessment. The examined data were analysis of lifespans of administrators. It allowed us to make collected from three websites: Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, sure that research, which is main topic of this paper, is well and Epinions. The important feature of those websites is the founded.