Wikipedia administrators
A scientific paper by researchers from Virginia Tech and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found that after editors are promoted to administrator status, they often focus more on articles about controversial topics than they did before. The researchers also proposed an different method for choosing administrators, in which more weight is given to the votes of experienced editors. Another paper, presented at the 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, analyzed data from all 1,551 requests for adminship from January 2006 to October 2007 to find out which (if any) of the criteria recommended in Wikipedia's Guide to requests for adminship page were the best predictors of whether the user in question would actually become an admin. In December 2013, a similar study was published by researchers from the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology in Warsaw which aimed to model the results of requests for adminship on the Polish Wikipedia using a model taken from Wikipedia's edit history. They found that they could "classify the votes in the RfA procedures using this model with an accuracy level that should be good enough to recommend candidates."