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

Research into user driven communities such as Wikipedia often focuses on community level characteristics, paying less attention to social processes performed within those communities. One important process is determining trust of community members. In Wikipedia, the access to specific tools requiring trust is determined through a community voting process known as request for adminship (RFA). In this study, we examine the impact of different forms of contribution made by adminship candidates on the community's overall decision as to whether to promote the candidate to administrator. To do so, we collected data on 754 RFA cases and used logistic regression to test four hypotheses. Our results supported the role of total contribution, and clarification of contribution in RFA success while the impacts of social contribution was partially supported and the role of content contribution was not supported. Also, both control variables (tenure and number of attempts) showed significant relationships with RFA success.