Social Interactions vs Revisions, What is Important for Promotion in Wikipédia ?
Nicolas Jullien a publié avec Romain Picot-Clémente et Cécile Bothorel un article sur ce sujet. Qu’est-ce qui importe pour être reconnu comme un bon contributeur ou comme un bon animateur sur Wikipedia ? Pour répondre à leurs questionnements, les auteurs observent le processus d’élection de l’administrateur de la communauté anglophone de Wikipedia.
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 candidate’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.