Building democratic communities and fostering inclusive participation is challenging, especially in participatory organisations where governance and sustained contributions are critical. This study explores the dynamics of election participation within the peer-production project Wikipedia, a prime example of an online collaboration model of democratic organisation where democratically elected administrators wield special rights. While previous research on online governance has predominantly focused on online interactions, this study shifts the spotlight to the influence of offline interactions occurring at various gatherings and meetings. Using fixed effects models and large-scale observational data spanning 20 years of offline and online actions, this study finds significant effects of offline meeting participation on users’ voting behaviour. It makes use of novel data sources to emphasise the significance of offline relationships in shaping online (democratic) processes and shows that traditional findings of political science and election research regarding social capital and social networks hold within an online context.

中文翻译：

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线下联系，线上投票：线下联系在线上公共选举中的作用


建设民主社区和促进包容性参与具有挑战性，特别是在治理和持续贡献至关重要的参与性组织中。本研究探讨了维基百科同行生产项目中选举参与的动态，这是民主组织在线协作模型的一个典型例子，在该模型中，民主选举产生的管理员拥有特殊权利。虽然之前关于在线治理的研究主要集中在在线互动上，但本研究将焦点转移到各种聚会和会议上发生的线下互动的影响上。本研究利用固定效应模型和跨越 20 年线下和线上行为的大规模观察数据，发现线下会议参与对用户投票行为的显着影响。它利用新颖的数据源来强调线下关系在塑造在线（民主）进程中的重要性，并表明政治学和选举研究有关社会资本和社交网络的传统发现在在线背景下仍然有效。