Wikipedia Requests for Adminship (with text)

West, Robert; Paskov, Hristo S.; Leskovec, Jure; Potts, Christopher

2014

For a Wikipedia editor to become an administrator, a request for adminship (RfA) must be submitted, either by the candidate or by another community member. Subsequently, any Wikipedia member may cast a supporting, neutral, or opposing vote. We crawled and parsed all votes since the adoption of the RfA process in 2003 through May 2013. The dataset has a size of 0,01 GB and contains 11,381 users (voters and votees) forming 189,004 distinct voter/votee pairs, for a total of 198,275 votes (this is larger than the number of distinct voter/votee pairs because, if the same user ran for election several times, the same voter/votee pair may contribute several votes). This induces a directed, signed network in which nodes represent Wikipedia members and edges represent votes. In this sense, the present dataset is a more recent version of the Wikipedia adminship election data. However, there is also a rich textual component in RfAs, which was not included in the older version: each vote is typically accompanied by a short comment (median/mean: 19/34 tokens). A typical positive comment reads, "I've no concerns, will make an excellent addition to the admin corps", while an example of a negative comment is, "Little evidence of collaboration with other editors and limited content creation."