From Meetups to Adminship: The Offline Path to Leadership on Wikipedia

Abstract

Wikipedia is one of the most widely used platforms for online knowledge production, yet its sustainability depends on a small group of elected administrators who enforce rules. Prior research has largely explained leadership trajectories through online activity and platform-native measures. In this paper, I extend this perspective by examining how offline interactions are associated with leadership outcomes in the German-language Wikipedia. Using a unique, observational dataset that combines two decades of online behavioural traces with records of offline community events, I apply hybrid multilevel random effects models to analyse both candidacy and election success. I find that attending offline meetings does not strongly predict who decides to run for administrator, but it substantially increases the chances of being elected. These statistical effects, however, are not consistent over time: offline interactions were most influential in the platform’s early years and declined in importance in more recent periods. The results demonstrate how social ties and in-person interactions intersect with online governance processes, offering new insights into leadership, participation, and the temporal dynamics of peer production communities. Beyond Wikipedia, this work contributes to computational social science by showing how online and offline interactional layers jointly structure leadership in large-scale digital platforms, while highlighting the need for future work capable of directly testing the mechanisms proposed here.