Key Points
- Administrators generally make more edits across all namespaces, but the post-meeting increase in activity is smaller than for other users.
- Administrators who had been inactive are more likely to resume editing after meetings, but their subsequent increase in activity is not as large as that of other users.
Background
Prior research suggests that meetings are essential to administrative decision-making and that users who become administrators may increase their activity after participating. This study examines how the administrator role influences contribution behavior following meetings.
Analysis Method
Dataset
- We combine a comprehensive dataset on informal offline meetings in the German-language Wikipedia community from 2001 to 2020 with large-scale online activity data.
- The dataset includes information on 4,408 small-scale meetings and 4,013 participating users.
- All online actions on Wikipedia are recorded, and users’ editing activities are measured from metadata dumps.
- Information on whether a user has ever become a Wikipedia administrator is also included.
Intervation / Explanatory Variable
- In addition to participation in offline meetings, we consider whether the user is an administrator.
- The models include an indicator for administrator status and its interaction terms.
Dependent Variable
- Outcome variables are the volume of users’ editing activity (number of edits) and the presence/absence of editing, analyzed over short, medium, and long horizons.
Identification Strategy
- We use a quasi-experimental design (DiD, matching, multilevel LPM, multilevel negative binomial models), incorporating triple interaction terms to assess how administrator status moderates meeting effects.
Results
- Users who are administrators tend to make more edits across all namespaces regardless of meeting participation.
- However, after attending a meeting, administrators show smaller increases in activity compared to other users. This likely reflects a ceiling effect: administrators already have high baseline activity, leaving less room for additional increases from meetings.
- In the medium-term (1 month) models, inactive administrators are more likely to resume editing after meetings; yet, as in the short-term models, their subsequent increase in activity is smaller than for other users. A similar negative moderating effect of administrator status appears in the long-term (1 year) trends.