Social Interactions vs Revisions, What is important for Promotion in Wikipedia?

TL;DR

This study investigates the factors influencing promotion to administrator in Wikipedia, highlighting the importance of both knowledge contributions and social interactions, with a predictive model achieving 78% accuracy.

Contribution

The paper introduces a combined model of social and knowledge variables using random forests to predict Wikipedia administrator promotions, improving understanding of promotion criteria.

Findings

Knowledge contributions are the most important factor.

Social interactions significantly influence promotion success.

Connectedness with future peers can determine election outcomes.

Abstract

In epistemic community, people are said to be selected on their knowledge contribution to the project (articles, codes, etc.) However, the socialization process is an important factor for inclusion, sustainability as a contributor, and promotion. Finally, what does matter to be promoted? being a good contributor? being a good animator? knowing the boss? We explore this question looking at the process of election for administrator in the English Wikipedia community. We modeled the candidates according to their revisions and/or social attributes. These attributes are used to construct a predictive model of promotion success, based on the candidates's past behavior, computed thanks to a random forest algorithm. Our model combining knowledge contribution variables and social networking variables successfully explain 78% of the results which is better than the former models. It also helps to refine the criterion for election. If the number of knowledge contributions is the most important element, social interactions come close second to explain the election. But being connected with the future peers (the admins) can make the difference between success and failure, making this epistemic community a very social community too.