Personal vs. know-how contacts: which matter more in wiki elections?

Abstract

The use of online social media is also connected with the real world. A very common example of this is the effect of social media coverage on the chances of success of elections. Previous literature has identified that the outcome of elections can often be predicted based on online public discussions. These discussions can be across various online social network with a special focus on the candidate's own accounts. Among many other forms of social media, Wikipedia is a very widely-used self-organizing information resource. The management and administration of Wikipedia is performed using special users which are elected by means of online public elections. In other words, the results of these elections pose as an emergent outcome of a large-scale self-organized opinion formation process. However, due to dynamical, and non-linear interactions besides the presence of mutual dependencies between election participants, a statistical analysis of this data can both be cumbersome as well as inefficient in terms of information extraction. We believe that social network analysis is a more appropriate alternative. It allows for the identification of local and global patterns, identification of influential nodes as well as the contacts involved in the influence. In general, this particular analytic technique can help in examining the internal complex network dynamics. In the current paper, we investigates whether personal contacts matter more than know-how contacts in wiki election nominations and voting participation. We employ the use of standard social network analysis tools such as Pajek and Gephi. The presented work demonstrates the significance of personal contacts over know-how contacts of a person in online elections. We have discovered that personal contacts, i.e. immediate neighbors (based on degree centrality) and neighborhood (k-neighbors) of a person have a positive effect on a person’s nomination as an administrator and also contribute to the active participation of voters in voting. Moreover, know-how contacts, analyzed by means of measures such as betweenness and closeness centralities, have a relatively insignificant effect on the selection of a person. However, know-how contacts, measured in terms of betweenness centrality can positively contribute only to the voting process—primarily due to the role played in passing information around the network. These contacts, also measured in terms of influence domain and PageRank, can play a vital role in the selection of an admin. Additionally, such contacts have a positive association with the voting process in terms of reachability and brokerage roles.