Revisiting Request for Adminship (RfA) within Wikipedia: How Do User Contributions Instill Community Trust?

Research into successful Request for Adminship (RfA) within Wikipedia is primarily focused on the impact of the relationship between adminship candidates and voters on RfA success. Very few studies, however, have investigated how candidates’ contributions may predict their success in the RfA process. In this study, we examine the impact of content and social contributions as well as total contributions made by adminship candidates on the community\u27s overall decision as to whether to promote the candidate to administrator. We also assess the influence of clarity of contribution on RfA success. To do so, we collected data on 754 RfA cases and used logistic regression to test four hypotheses. Our results highlight the important role that user contribution behaviors and activity history have on the user’s success in the RfA process. The results also suggest that tenure and number of RfA attempts play a role in the RfA process. Our findings have implications for theory and practice

Polycentric Information Commons: A Theory Development and Empirical Investigation

Decentralized systems online—such as open source software (OSS) development, online communities, wikis, and social media—often experience decline in participation which threatens their long-terms sustainability. Building on a rich body of research on the sustainability of physical resource systems, this dissertation presents a novel theoretical framing that addresses the sustainability issues arising in decentralized systems online and which are amplified because of their open nature. The first essay develops the theory of polycentric information commons (PIC) which conceptualizes decentralized systems online as “information commons”. The theory defines information commons, the stakeholders that participate in them, the sustainability indicators of information commons and the collective-action threats putting pressure on their long-term sustainability. Drawing on Ostrom’s factors associated with stable common pool resource systems, PIC theory specifies four polycentric governance practices that can help information commons reduce the magnitude and impact of collective-action threats while improving the information commons’ sustainability. The second essay further develops PIC theory by applying it in an empirical context of “digital activism”. Specifically, it examines the role of polycentric governance in reducing the threats to the legitimacy of digital activism—a type of information commons with an overarching objective of instigating societal change. As such, it illustrates the applicability of PIC theory in the study of digital activism. The third essay focuses on the threat of “information pollution” and its impact on open collaboration, a type of information commons dedicated to the creation of value through open participation online. It uncovers the way polycentric governance mechanism help reduce the duration of pollution events. This essay contributes to PIC theory by expanding it to the realm of operational governance in open collaboration

Study on open science: The general state of the play in Open Science principles and practices at European life sciences institutes

Nowadays, open science is a hot topic on all levels and also is one of the priorities of the European Research Area. Components that are commonly associated with open science are open access, open data, open methodology, open source, open peer review, open science policies and citizen science. Open science may a great potential to connect and influence the practices of researchers, funding institutions and the public. In this paper, we evaluate the level of openness based on public surveys at four European life sciences institute