Governance in Social Media: A Case Study of the Wikipedia Promotion Process

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. Secon...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICWSM
• Authors: Jure Leskovec, Daniel P. Huttenlocher, Jon M. Kleinberg
• Keywords: Group Reaches Decisions, ICWSM 2010, Internet Technology, Social Media Governance, Social Media Sites