Taking Up the Mop: Identifying Future Wikipedia Administrators

Taking Up the Mop: Identifying Future Wikipedia Administrators - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2008, written by Moira Burke and Robert E. Kraut.

Overview

As Wikipedia grows, so do the messy byproducts of collaboration. Backlogs of administrative work are increasing, suggesting the need for more users with privileged admin status. This paper presents a model of editors who have successfully passed the peer review process to become admins. The lightweight model is based on behavioral metadata and comments, and does not require any page text. It demonstrates that the Wikipedia community has shifted in the last two years to prioritizing policymaking and organization experience over simple article-level coordination, and mere edit count does not lead to adminship. The model can be applied as an "AdminFinderBot" to automatically search all editors' histories and pick out likely future admins, as a self-evaluation tool, or as a dashboard of relevant statistics for voters evaluating admin candidates.