ENDORSEMENT WITHOUT NEW EVIDENCE: HOW SEQUENTIAL VOTING INFLATES MANDATES IN ONLINE COMMUNITY GOVERNANCE

Online communities frequently use public, sequential voting to grant authority, often interpreting large support margins as a strong mandate of community consensus. However, this study investigates whether these margins accurately reflect the independent scrutiny invested in a decision. The authors introduce a measure called "vote-text divergence," which identifies instances where a decisive vote is paired with a thin, deferential rationale (e.g., "per nom"). Using a dataset of 198,275 votes from Wikipedia's Requests for Adminship (RfA) process, the researchers analyze how voter arrival order, the accumulation of prior discussion, and network position influence the quality of rationales provided.

The study reveals that vote-text divergence increases as an election progresses. Later voters are significantly more likely to provide deferential, low-effort rationales compared to early voters. Crucially, this behavior is not driven by a "bandwagon" effect or conformity to the visible majority tally. Instead, it is explained by information saturation: as the volume of prior discussion grows, the evidentiary space becomes exhausted, leading later voters to restate agreement rather than contribute new, independent scrutiny. This effect is most pronounced among network-peripheral voters, who may have fewer incentives to invest in costly, independent evaluation.

These findings challenge the assumption that a large voting margin is a reliable signal of broad, independent scrutiny. While the community successfully promotes capable administrators—as evidenced by the lack of correlation between divergence and post-promotion performance—the margin itself can be misleading. This creates a "signal problem" where the perceived mandate is stronger than the actual evidence supporting it. The authors suggest that platform designers should move away from simple, flat tallies and instead implement systems that distinguish between new evidentiary contributions and mere endorsements to better capture the true level of community scrutiny.