Governance in Social Media: A case study of the Wikipedia promotion process

TL;DR

This paper examines the deliberative governance process in social media through a detailed case study of Wikipedia admin promotion elections, revealing how relationships influence voting and decision-making.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the public, recorded deliberative process in social media governance, focusing on Wikipedia's election system and its underlying assessment models.

Findings

Support for candidates depends on voter-candidate relationship characteristics.

Voting behavior and election outcomes can be modeled considering the sequential and public nature of votes.

The process exhibits fundamental forms of relative assessment in decision-making.

Abstract

Social media sites are often guided by a core group of committed users engaged in various forms of governance. A crucial aspect of this type of governance is deliberation, in which such a group reaches decisions on issues of importance to the site. Despite its crucial --- though subtle --- role in how a number of prominent social media sites function, there has been relatively little investigation of the deliberative aspects of social media governance. Here we explore this issue, investigating a particular deliberative process that is extensive, public, and recorded: the promotion of Wikipedia admins, which is determined by elections that engage committed members of the Wikipedia community. We find that the group decision-making at the heart of this process exhibits several fundamental forms of relative assessment. First we observe that the chance that a voter will support a candidate is strongly dependent on the relationship between characteristics of the voter and the candidate. Second we investigate how both individual voter decisions and overall election outcomes can be based on models that take into account the sequential, public nature of the voting.