Mopping up

Moira Burke, Robert Kraut
2008 Proceedings of the ACM 2008 conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '08  
This paper presents a model of the behavior of candidates for promotion to administrator status in Wikipedia. It uses a policy capture framework to highlight similarities and differences in the community's stated criteria for promotion decisions to those criteria actually correlated with promotion success. As promotions are determined by the consensus of dozens of voters with conflicting opinions and unwritten expectations, the results highlight the degree to which consensus is truly reached.
more » ... e model is fast and easily computable on the fly, and thus could be applied as a self-evaluation tool for editors considering becoming administrators, as a dashboard for voters to view a nominee's relevant statistics, or as a tool to automatically search for likely future administrators. Implications for distributed consensus-building in online communities are discussed.
doi:10.1145/1460563.1460571 dblp:conf/cscw/BurkeK08 fatcat:76gbrewd6faxbdqvwaius3v7ya