Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2015

2015 Arbitration Committee Elections

Status

• The December 2015 Arbitration Committee Election results have been posted.
• Please offer your feedback on the election process.

Unnecessary times confusing

The use of superfluous / ambiguous 0:00 makes the times confusing (e.g. Sunday 00:00, 8 November 2015.) Just do it like did last year: has registered an account before 28 October 2014, Sunday 00:01, 9 November NE Ent 10:16, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

And above I see "10:59am" specified—a departure from midnight (why?), and who knows what timezone it is ... Mongolian central? The expressions of time were got right years ago, but the current organisers don't seem to know how to make it simple and unambiguous. Tony (talk) 02:06, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

As I've mentioned on my talk page, the departure from last year was to provide an exact cut off time. The reason you are seeing "10:59am" is likely due to your account preferences. The default time displays in UTC. Mike V • Talk 02:36, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

A day starts at midnight and ends at midnight. That's sufficiently exact. NE Ent 02:48, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

It's not, and is very likely to cause confusion. Tony (talk) 11:40, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

начинается в полночь и заканчивается в полночь. Это достаточно точно. NE Ent 02:48, 10 ноября 2015 (UTC)[ответ]

Это не так, и очень вероятно, что это вызовет путаницу. Tony (talk) 11:40, 12 ноября 2015 (UTC)[ответ]

128.0.81.114 (talk) 19:21, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Questions for candidates

Are there any guidelines for posing questions to candidates? One editor is asking for candidates to disclose a lot of personal information about themselves. Of course, the candidate can refuse to answer but it seems like this kind of questioning is invasive, especially since it asks candidates to disclose disabilities they have. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:40, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

I agree, these sorts of questions seem inappropriate to me, although I don't know if they are specifically restricted..--Pharos (talk) 22:48, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

There was no consensus during the RfC to allow commissioners to remove questions. Also pinging @GrammarFascist: Brustopher (talk) 23:23, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Just to see if there is an official response, I'll ping the election commissioners: Mdann52, Mike V and Guy Macon. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:23, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

• If it turns out to be considered inappropriate, I apologize in advance if answering it quickly as I did gave it an air of legitimacy or reasonableness. I only gave it an answer because these are things I had already disclosed, but I understand not everybody holds a similar open-book policy and I might've similarly objected to the question if I hadn't already divulged all that it asked about. I don't want the fact that I've answered it to be construed as an implicit endorsement of its suitability. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 23:38, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

• Ditto MarkBernstein (talk) 23:42, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

To my knowledge, there hasn't been any discussion about the type of questions that are or aren't permitted. If a candidate doesn't wish to answer a question, they have no obligation to do so. Should the candidate decline to answer all or part of this question, the community should be respectful of that decision. Speaking with my election commissioner hat off, I don't think this question will provide much insight, especially since there is no permitted way to verify the answer a candidate may provide. Mike V • Talk 03:40, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

• • Well yes, there should be guidelines for questions, since humungous bloat has been a persistent trend. It's a major burden on candidates, and ends up being ignored by almost all voters. Questions on policy matters that don't involve ArbCom's judicial role, its process, or its consitution, require special justification, in my view. It's not gov-com. Tony (talk) 02:04, 10 November 2015 (UTC)
• I have raised a particular objection on their talkpage. -- Amanda (aka DQ) 15:39, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

---

Consider the Electoral Commission mandate:

"The mandate of the Electoral Commission is to deal with any unforeseen problems that may arise in the 2015 Arbitration Committee election process, and to adjudicate any disputes during the election. However, members of the Election Commission should intervene only when there is a problem that needs resolving, and either discussion is not working, the rules are unclear, or there isn't time for a lengthy discussion.

In addition, while the Electoral Commission is not responsible for logistics of the election, the Commissioners should also help ensure that preparations for the election—such as setting up the relevant pages, posting notices of the election in the appropriate places, and asking the Office to configure the SecurePoll voting interface—move forward in a timely fashion." --Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections December 2015/Electoral Commission

As I see it, there are two things that we three commissioners (why do I keep thinking of the Batman TV show every time I use that word?) should be doing:

[A] non-controversial clerk-type tasks. A good example of this would be removing a candidate who filed but didn't realize that he does not meet the qualifications. These tasks can be done by any single commissioner (nanananananana...) because if it really is non-controversial, nobody will oppose it.

[B] Dealing with unforeseen problems and adjudicating disputes. If someone call on us to do this we should discuss it amongst ourselves, take a vote and issue a 2:1 or 3:0 ruling. It is my hope that we complete the election without ever having occasion to do this.

Drawing up guidelines for posing questions to candidates does not fit [A] above. It could fit [B] if there was a good-faith dispute about whether to have such guidelines, but in this case Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections December 2015#Get rid of the default questions? and Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections December 2015#Question/answer limits appears to have answered this question. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:08, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

The very idea to sanitize the set of the questions asked to the candidates during this "Answer to Questions" exercise seems weird. We are not recruiting cyclists to deliver pizzas. We are recruiting the team whose job will be to sanitize the workplace. OUR workplace. The way a candidate answers the questions, especially answers the problematic questions, is a great indication of how she will behave if elected. Not understanding how to behave in face of the GrammarFacist's questions is problematic. In the same vein, not understanding what happens when someone comes to rehash her last case is problematic. For the old crocodiles, this is a non sequitur. For the newbies, let us see their learning curve: will they strike out their initial answer, and tell us what they learned ? Pldx1 (talk) 16:59, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Template:ACE question

Would it be possible for someone to amend template:ACE Question such that multi-paragraph and bullet-point answers do not break the formatting. If not, would someone please tweak things so that it works on my question page (I'll likely be able to copy the syntax for the future but don't have time to figure it out for myself). Thanks, Thryduulf (talk) 00:06, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Thryduulf, you may have to manually bullet them using <br> and • symbols, such as:

2. This is a first question

   Here is a line
   •Here is a bulleted entry
   •Here is another bulleted entry.

It may not be pretty, but here. --kelapstick^(bainuu) 00:55, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

You can also use embedded HTML tags like this:

1. This is a second question

   This is the answer:

   • First line
   • Second line

Kirill Lokshin (talk) 00:59, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Show off :) --kelapstick^(bainuu) 01:00, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

(1) I have added first in the User:kelapstick's message and second to the Kirill Lokshin's message, with the hope that both users will accept these modifications. Please revert if you don't agree.

(2) And now is what I want to ask. You got two questions. You answered each of them in it's ad hoc frame. Then the author of the first question replies to your answer, outside of the first frame. And now, both questions one and two are numbered '1' (exactly as just above). What is your preferred strategy for the second question remains numbered 2 ? Pldx1 (talk) 13:52, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

I've replaced the bodged code so that * and # now work. I'll take a look at anything else later on once I'm back. Mdann52 (talk) 14:01, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Mdann52, your change seems to have messed up the ability to number questions, as they are all numbered 1 now. Pldx1, thank you for making the changes above. --kelapstick^(bainuu) 15:58, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

It would be nice to have the ability to override the automatic numbering. Currently, as mentioned above, if the question–answer blocks are broken up by added comments, it causes the numbering to start again from 1. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 07:57, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

Non-administrator Arbitrators RfC

An RfC has been opened to discuss if non-administrators appointed to the arbitration committee should be granted the administrator right. All editors are encouraged to provide their input. Mike V • Talk 21:54, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

Health & disability

• I was debating whether to bring the issue up here or simply to let it go, as I suspect bringing it up would damage my candidacy - but ultimately have decided that bringing it up and having it addressed is more significant than what happens to my candidacy one way or another. As I've disclosed in multiple places over the years, I have both chronic health and disability issues (including a connective tissue disorder, and an episode of sepsis ~11 months ago.) I wouldn't be running for a term if I wasn't confident I could fulfill it. I've received at least one question that specifically asked about disability among other things (from @GrammarFascist:) in the interests of getting a more diverse arbcom. Unfortunately, I don't feel that I can give GF an adequate answer given that both several voter guides have brought up my health and disability as an issue, and Giano has done so in my candidacy questions page itself. The WMF has passed a non-discrimination policy that applies to users, Wikipedia:Non-discrimination_policy, which I view as meaning that snarky comments about information I've previously self-disclosed related to my health and disability status as both inappropriate and in explicit contravention of policy that we can't override at a local level. I'd love to be able to give GF a fuller answer, but feel inhibited from doing so when in the same question page, someone is making snarky comments in contravention of Wikipedia:Non-discrimination_policy. Obviously, Giano isn't going to vote for me regardless of the situation, but would a passing admin, if they agree with my interpretation of Wikipedia:Non-discrimination_policy, mind getting rid of Giano's snark about my health on my questions page, as well as removing comments from any other candidates' page that contravene the non-discrimination policy? I view GF's interest in knowing as much as they can with the goal of a diverse arbcom in mind as significantly more important than people's interest in snarking about the health of candidates. Kevin Gorman (talk) 19:50, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Best of health to you. --Monochrome_Monitor 00:11, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Honestly, you've said you feel confident in fulfilling your duties and there should be nothing more to it. If for some reason you can not fulfill your responsibilities, the world nor Wikipedia will not end. Beach drifter (talk) 04:40, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Temporary CU for 2015 Arbitration Committee election scrutineers

For the purpose of scrutineering the 2015 Arbitration Committee elections, stewards Mardetanha, Shanmugamp7, and Einsbor, appointed as scrutineers, are granted temporary local CheckUser permissions effective from the time of the passage of this motion until the certification of the election results.

For the Arbitration Committee; Courcelles (talk) 22:37, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Temporary CU for 2015 Arbitration Committee election scrutineers

Is it ok to remove a question and answer after the fact?

This answer was helpful and its removal does a disservice to other voters. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.170.50.50 (talk) 22:26, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Troll. BMK (talk) 17:02, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Where's the link to vote?

It looks like it's time to vote. Shouldn't there be a link on the project page to the voting page? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:04, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

I was wondering that too... JMHamo (talk) 00:06, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Working now - pretty sure I voted. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:11, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Me too. I used the Leisure Suit Larry Principle - clicking on links until I found the right one. Couldn't we have a big VOTE button? Hawkeye7 (talk) 02:16, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm so disappointed I missed this  -  thank you for including me  VM321 (talk) 01:38, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

How many?

How many people can you vote for in this election? I would think it would be easier to find the answer to this question, but I haven't been able to. I would appreciate it if someone would tell me the answer here. Everymorning (talk) 02:02, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

You cast 21 votes choosing between Support, Neutral, or Oppose. Thus you could vote for (i.e. support) all 21 candidates. I'm pretty sure nobody would want to do that - it wouldn't help or hurt anybody - but you could if you wanted to. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:30, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

N Wrong Do the math. Let p be the support votes for a candidate and q be the oppose votes. Then the impact of an additional support vote will be

$\Delta v={\frac {p+1}{p+q+1}}-{\frac {p}{p+q}}={\frac {(p+q)(p+1)-p(p+q+1)}{(p+q)(p+q+1)}}={\frac {p^{2}+p+pq+q-p^{2}-pq-p}{(p+q)(p+q+1)}}={\frac {q}{(p+q)(p+q+1)}}$

The impact will be different for each candidate, depending on how many support or oppose votes they have. Hawkeye7 (talk) 09:10, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

I stand corrected. Possibly among other things, supporting every candidate helps those with fewer total votes. Consider the following series of (S/(S+O))

• (0/0) undefined %, (1/2), (2/4), (3/6), (4/8) [all 50% except for 0/0]. Adding 1 support to each gives you:
• (1/1) 100%, (2/3) 67%, (3/5) 60%, (5/9) 55.6%. It's clear that voting for all candidates helps those with the fewest votes.

But at (100/200) ==> (101/201) ~ 50.25%, the effect is pretty small. I'll suggest that with the number of votes we're getting, it won't make much difference at all. But thanks for the correction. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:54, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Great. Thanks. Everymorning (talk) 02:34, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

You can vote for or against each candidate, or leave them neutral if you are not sure. Candidates need to have 50% support to sit on the committee, so voting oppose or support does actually make a difference for each candidate. Worm^TT(talk) 09:17, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Talkpage notifications

Good move. Tony (talk) 13:25, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

I apologise to anyone who received a double notification - this was due to some lag on my end, where the page saved after I sent the message :/ I'm doing this manually now as opposed to some half-broken script. Mdann52 (talk) 13:58, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

May I ask by what criteria you've selected the recipients? Just wandering since apparently not everybody received it.--TMCk (talk) 14:06, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I have yet to receive any notice on my talk page, not that I need one. I don't believe I opted-out from receiving such notices. Strong early turnout. Over 250 votes, just 15 hours in. Wbm1058 (talk) 15:37, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

TMCk I was advised that if I tried sending these all out at once, it might do crazy things like crash the site, so I'm sending them out in batches, based upon what appears to be randomness (I believe it is related to account ID's or something). @Wbm1058: it will come unless you want me to take your name off my list! I'm roughly 1/5 of the way through now FYI. Mdann52 (talk) 16:20, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

• 250 votes this soon in to the election is exciting, and suggests we'll have a much bigger turnout than last year. With the sheer number of messages Mdann realistically has to batch them, since doing otherwise would crash the servers. All eligible voters should receive a massmessage way before the voting period is up. Kevin Gorman (talk) 16:35, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

@Mdann52: Appears to be random? So they might be not? Please clarify. Thank you.--TMCk (talk) 16:35, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

@TracyMcClark: Essentially, I have no idea how they are ordered, but everyone who didn't opt out before I started the run (or has dropped me a massage since I started) will receive one, hopefully by this time Wednesday all being well. Mdann52 (talk) 16:37, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying.--TMCk (talk) 16:39, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

@Kevin Gorman:, how can you see the numbers? Usually after I vote I go to the securepoll to make sure my name is on the list and it shows everyone that voted. This year I only see an empty page. Dave Dial (talk) 17:35, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

• This link works for me, Dave. Kevin Gorman (talk) 18:04, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

• Thanks Kevin, that link works for me too. Although I thought users could usually go here and then here to make sure their vote registered and see the list of voters. Dave Dial (talk) 18:16, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

• I don't know about those two pages, but whoa, our turnout this year is going to beat last year's easily. We're already pushing 400 votes. Kevin Gorman (talk) 18:23, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

• You probably should have thought about not leaving messages to vanished users... seriously >_> ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 17:50, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

The massmessaging this year was done in some haste, and I believe only the commissioners actually have the full list currently. Next year if the same thing is done I'd expect us to filter out vanished users, bots, those with active blocks, and a variety of other groups that may not have been filtered this year. Kevin Gorman (talk) 18:04, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Such as articles? clpo13_(talk) 18:14, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Though I have absolutely no idea how those ended up on Mdann's list, luckily the namespaces you can massmessage are limited so such errors won't do anything. I don't recall if it can post to article talkpages, so @Mdann52: it might be worth running a quick filter to ensure only User talk: is included. Kevin Gorman (talk) 18:20, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

@Salvidrim!: The list I am using is purely the list I was handed - it is some 100,000+ users long, so I hope you understand why I haven't been able to probe it too deeply! (although I do remove vanished users as and when I spot them). @Kevin Gorman and Clpo13: Unfortunately, the tool had been changed since I last used it, something I didn't spot until I checked the error log...:P Mdann52 (talk) 18:23, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

If you want, if it's not sensitive, I can quickly filter out some groups if you toss it to me. Vanished users, anything thats not user talk:, etc. Kevin Gorman (talk) 18:25, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Nothing non user-talk left (already done that), set up a script to remove any vanished users (using vanished in the name, appears there was an old convention not to include "user" as well....) Mdann52 (talk) 18:30, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Kevin Gorman, as a candidate on the ballot, you should not be volunteering to filter out groups... Wbm1058 (talk) 20:23, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

WBM: the only reason I offered to do was because it was originally my proposal in the first place, and wouldn't want a technical error to prevent the proposal from succeeding. I handed off essentially everything to do with the proposal to Mdann of my own accord as soon as I decided to run. I'm perfectly happy not to provide assistance as long as it's not needed, and I'm guessin it won't be needed. Kevin Gorman (talk) 21:48, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

I agree, it would be best if any list editing is left to the election commissioners. (This is after all what we were appointed to do! ) Also, vanished users, provided that they aren't subject to a block or using multiple accounts to vote, are permitted to vote as per the voter requirements. Now whether or not the community/'crats will reverse the vanishing as a result of resuming activity is a whole different matter. Mike V • Talk 00:59, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

As I said, I'm more than happy to let other people handle it, but just spoke up because the original pseudo-poll involved me doing it and at least one election commissioner actively not wanting to take a role in sending out the message at the time :) Kevin Gorman (talk) 01:13, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Looking at this list, I am seeing some editors' names more than once. I trust the election commissioners will delete the duplicate votes. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:39, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

• When you change your vote, the secure poll still lists your other votes but they are greyed out. Also, the Scrutineers comb through the voters to ensure voting integrity. Just in case editors attempt to vote more than once with different accounts. Dave Dial (talk) 20:56, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Well, what I saw looks like an editor who hit submit twice as they were submitted at the same minute so it's just a glitch that will be corrected. I was wondering though if someone voted today, changed their mind and then voted again before the deadline, if the second vote would be the one considered. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:05, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Commissioners do not strike or remove any votes - there is a consensus that while we can, we should use the scrutineers to do that instead. SecurePoll does automatically discount duplicate votes - they are recorded in the log so we can view and assess the attached metadata if needed (note: This is CU-like data, we can't see who individual voters have voted for! Mdann52 (talk) 21:28, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Only the latest submitted vote is counted by the software. -- KTC (talk) 23:18, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Liz, I see an instance where someone's name appears three times in a row, all with the same time stamp. But the first two are greyed out, meaning they will not count, which is as it sshould be. The trick here is that the "grey" type is almost identical to the black type, so if you don't know that you're looking for something just a tiny bit lighter, you may not notice it. 00:47, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

• Interestingly, assuming most votes are valid, we're already within 60 or so votes of 2014. Kevin Gorman (talk) 23:58, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Are the notifications new? If so it's probably responsible for the turnout. --Monochrome_Monitor 00:15, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Guides to guides please

These arb com election things were an exciting idea years ago, but as the years wear on it becomes a little more tedious. Guides to guides were, for me, the easiest way to get into it No one would decide their votes on a guide to guides, but the navigation aide is helpful. Why hide them? "Guides to other guides are ineligible". Who made that rule and why? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 14:53, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

As I understand it, Guides to Guides are permitted, they just aren't listed alongside the regular guides. Maybe you should put one together. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:35, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Yeah maybe. A guide to guides is just a table, candidates versus guide writers showing a matrix of recommendations. I've seen them appear in the course of the elections previously, but cannot see why a link to one is prohibited from Template:ACE2015. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:13, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Actually, I think "guides to guides" were typically evaluations of the voter guides. "User:A's recommendations are sound; User:B's recommendations are off-base for XYZ reason; etc." (There was speculation one year about whether someone would do a guide to guide to guides....) Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:47, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

That makes sense, I can see such things would likely become inappropriate. I guess I am want a "summary of the guides", which would probably be acceptable. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:18, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Some questions related to guides of guides building:
1. Does the Donkey Enforcement Policy applies to guides of guides, requiring a merciless sorting of the candidates' names and the writers' names in order to protect the voters from their irrepressible propensity to Donkey vote ?
2. How to convert indications into numbers ? For my private use, I translate a five levels vote according to strong oppose -> -2, oppose-> -1, neutral ->0 (etc) and a three levels vote according to oppose->-2, neutral ->0, support->+2. Is this a fair representation of the guides (or only my private opinion) ? What to do when a line is a code 4 ?
3. How to summarize the guides ? A simple addition gives someone with -21, someone else with +23. Should we ponder by the number of visits that the different guides have received ? Or ponder otherwise ?
4. And the most important questions: How different are the guides? What is a rightful comment (I like this guide because I wrote it would surely be OK while this other guide reveals that POV would surely be controversial if false and even more controversial if true). And finaly, how are these guides correlated to the results (this last one will be better answered post festum). Pldx1 (talk) 23:14, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

I needn't be that hard. By for the hardest thing to summarize the guides is doing the wiki formatting of the table. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:18, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

There were both kinds of "guides to guides": Summaries of other guides, and evaluations of other guides. I seem to recall that one person included one of these (probably the latter) in their own "regular: guide, which made it sort of a hybrid. And I do believe that at one point someone did go so far as to make a guide to guides to guides, just to make a point. I believe the reason the "guides to guides" (etc.) are not linked in the election template anymore is that it was decided that way in an RfC. My guess would be the 2013 RfC, give or take a year. Neutron (talk) 00:40, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Guides to guides are not permitted on the ACE template as a result of this RfC. Mike V • Talk 01:35, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: in case you haven't seen it, User:Ealdgyth/2015 Arb Guide consolidation chart seems to be what you're after. Jenks24 (talk) 06:37, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Beautiful. Thank you Jenks. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:23, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-11-25/Arbitration_report#Arbitration_Committee_Elections_2015, which summarizes 25 voter-guides. Re-ping SmokeyJoe, in case they are still thinking things over, or thinking about changing their vote-prefs. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:44, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Mass-messaging article talk pages

Hi! I don't know how this happened, but I don't think the Talk:TokuMX article is eligible to vote. :)

I have reverted the bot edit for now. -- intgr [talk] 22:48, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

• User talk:Lmxspice redirects to Talk:TokuMX because of an inappropriate page move in 2013 and the notification bot probably followed the redirect. The talk page currently contains lots of notifications which are obviously meant for the user's talk page and not for an article talk page, and there's nothing on the talk page which is meant to be in the article talk namespace. I suggest that we move back the article talk page to the user talk namespace. --Stefan2 (talk) 00:17, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
  •  Done (except I haven't restored the message about the elections). Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 00:41, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, I saw this now. I've been removing the messages from several article talk pages that received it (see here for MWmd's recent posts to article talk pages). Maybe something else needs to be fixed on these pages too? ---Sluzzelin talk 17:09, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Voting seems to be broken

I was notified that I can vote here.
The link brings me to https://vote.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/560
Pressing the submit vote button there brings me to https://vote.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:SecurePoll/vote/560&action=vote
The text there is:
"SecurePoll
< SecurePoll


You must log in to vote in this election

"

I am logged in, though, to English Wikipedia and my global account.

My apologies for putting this on top - but if that is actually broken it should be fixed rather sooner than later. Wefa (talk) 00:22, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

@Wefa: The voting needs to originate from the English Wikipedia, while the voter log is viewed from the vote wiki. Please try voting from this link here and let me know if you still have any difficulties. Best, Mike V • Talk 01:09, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

You must log in to vote in this election

When I attempted to submit my vote, I received a "You must log in to vote in this election" error. Resubmitting the vote did not fix the problem. The vote was only accepted after I restarted from the landing page and patiently filled in the (randomised) form again. This may be because I took over an hour to review the candidates; if so, this should be fixed, since we should not discourage thoughtful voting. --pmj (talk) 00:35, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

same here. Either a cookie expired or it didn't survive the midnight hop. Both can and should be fixed! Wefa (talk) 00:37, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

@Pmj: The voting needs to originate from the English Wikipedia, while the voter log is viewed from the vote wiki. Please try voting from this link here and let me know if you still have any difficulties. Also, it's very likely that the cookie expired. We've set it for a limited duration to assist with the integrity of the election. We recommend keeping a copy of your vote selection in case of technical difficulties and/or if you decide to change your vote before the close of the voting period. Best, Mike V • Talk 01:09, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

That is the page I started from, and the vote submission did succeed the second time.

Is there a specific attack which timing out the cookie aims to mitigate? None comes to mind other than a user leaving their session unattended. Any time limit chosen will be a compromise, but since multiple people are hitting this issue I suggest that three hours is more reasonable. --pmj (talk) 02:01, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

I entered the voting from the suggested link and also encountered this problem. Some folks might just give up if they hit this glitch. --Big_iron (talk) 05:52, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

I just received this error after having spent several hours reviewing and deciding upon each candidate. I went to the Special:SecurePoll page and pressed the vote button there, this time submitting an all neutral vote to see if it works, and it did. Seems like something timed out to me. I'll probably return at some point to try to remember all of my votes, but I have to say, this was supremely frustrating and I definitely give up for the night at least.  DiscantX 12:00, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Same here - when I tried to submit my careful work of voting the vote was rejected with the You must log in to vote in this election error. After trying unsuccessfully to login and coming back to the voting page a minute later I submitted an All neutral ballot that was accepted.Netrapt (talk) 07:12, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Spam

My talk page was spammed by a "ArbCom elections are now open!" message despite the {{nobots}} template. Leave us alone! — Preceding unsigned comment added by ‎84.93.60.82 (talk)

The message was sent as a result of the mass message functionality. If you wish to opt out of all mass messages, please add [[:Category:Opted-out of message delivery]] to your user talk page. Mike V • Talk 01:25, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Maybe [[:Category:Opted-out of message delivery]] should be added to {{nobots}}? Catnip the Elder (talk) 03:30, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Regardless of the proposer, I think this is a valid suggestion. I'll copy it to Template talk:No bots. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 14:34, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Arbitrary removal of voter guides

I wrote a voter guide and added it to the template. It was removed by someone citing "you haven't edited in nine years and wouldn't have the experience needed to assess the candidates". Is that proper?

The template says "All individually written voter guides are eligible for inclusion." Plus, even though I haven't edited from 2006-2015 I have edited recently (e.g. Taylor Swift discography) and during the time I wasn't editing I did read various discussions across Wikipedia such as AfD, AN/I, ArbCom cases, etc. So I believe I am able to assess the candidates.

THEowner of a l l 15:40, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Can you understand Ed's rationale at least? Before you were indef blocked for vandalism (slightly different than "I haven't edited from 2006-2015"), you had about 30 edits that were vandalism. Since being unblocked 2 weeks ago, you've made a total of 3 useful edits, and played with your ACE guide. You're still running a 1:10 useful edits:vandalism ratio. Unless there are other accounts in the intervening 9 years we don't know about? Adding your guide to the list is light trolling. We suck at handling light trolling, so I'd advise everyone to ignore this, rather than start a fight about removing it (because a fight is what you want). But if you're hoping to not be considered a troll, you should work more on having a useful edit:vandalism ratio greater than 1 before recommending ArbCom candidates. --Floquenbeam (talk) 17:09, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

I don't want a "fight", I want for my guide to be included per the template or if that is controversial I want an actual consensus on what the eligibility requirement for inclusion should be. THEowner of a l l 23:21, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Responses to responses not transcluding to Main Discussion page?

Several candidates have responded to my questions on Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2015/Candidates/Discussion, but my responses to their responses do not appear. F.e if you click on Edit Source Callenec or Edit Source GorillaWarfare, you'll see my edits there. But not on the page itself. Is it me? It's probably me. - Thanks; LeoRomero (talk) 18:40, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

NVM it's working now LeoRomero (talk) 18:42, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Super turnout

It's rather amazing and I don't quite know what to make of it. I'll just report that I just counted 1310 voters in just under two days. What is the all-time record?

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 23:42, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

1310 unique voters?! → Call me Hahc21 00:01, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

I win! How the hell did I get eligible anyway? --Monochrome_Monitor 00:12, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Well you have more than 500 edits and your account is older than 6 months. I don't remember if that's the current criteria but i think I'm close. That makes you eligible to vote. → Call me Hahc21 00:29, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

I get email from the Wikiproject taskforce that I'm on, through a GNU thing. It said that a lot of people don't vote in ArbCom elections even though they are eligible, so I made a point of voting this year. I would guess that the mailing list has at least 5000 people, and about 100 are active throughout the year on the mailing list, so maybe we helped to sway the vote count numbers upward by 50 or so? They didn't tell us to do block voting or anything like that! They just told us that ArbCom voting existed and that it was coming up soon.--FeralOink (talk) 04:10, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

I think the main reason was the talk page notifications that were sent throughout the Wiki this year. → Call me Hahc21 04:20, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

It's incredible. I think I just counted almost 1500 unique votes in just over two days ... almost three times the vote over the whole two-week period last year. Talkpage notifications should be standard from now on, I think. Tony (talk) 11:37, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Something makes me want to keep a running total, but ultimately it will be a waste of time. I just counted approx 1620 voters (not unique voters) (1620 is a real turkey number!). I suppose one reason to count is to inform the scrutineers that they will have some extra work to do this year. Happy holiday. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:49, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

I think we just hit 2,000 - so we're roughly keeping up the same pace. I know, I'll stop this soon. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:40, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

The workload on the scrutineers is a real concern. In the past people have complained when the results weren't posted as fast as people thought they should have been. I think I read somewhere that this year the scrutineers were going to start their work while the election was still going on. That's probably a good idea. Maybe we need a couple more scrutineers? (Or do they each have to look at each voter anyway? I'm not sure about that.) Neutron (talk) 02:19, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

The intensity with which stewards have approached their task has varied considerably in past years. When I co-ran the election in 2010, was it, a dam of pressure built on the stewards to hurry their task, continually dampened by those running the election. It took almost a week. The following year, the task took just a few days. Some liaison with the stewards by election runners this year might ensure a balance—and community members have pitched in to help in auditing the public log in the past, to ease the pressure on stewards a little. But that needs to be organised and promoted. User:Happy-melon knows a lot about managing this kind of thing, but I see he hasn't edited since May. Tony (talk) 04:59, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

The stewards are already well underway with the task :) Mdann52 (talk) 09:52, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Is there an intent to notify everyone who is eligible to vote? I have seen such notifications to others, but not received one myself (and have just successfully voted). Espresso Addict (talk) 10:08, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

I think a bot placed notices on the talk page of editors who appeared to be eligible to vote, I believe there might have been some minor glitches, e.g. some editors have a "no posts by bots" feature turned on, perhaps the list of apparently eligible voters was a bit off - but I suppose not by much - and it may have taken awhile for all the notices to be placed. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:47, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

I wonder why it didn't notify me? I receive bot notices, and I'm not borderline in eligibility. Espresso Addict (talk) 22:10, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Smallbones, Tony1, is the mass turnout a good thing? I randomly looked at two voters whose names I didn't recognize. Both accounts had been used only occasionally over the years. Assuming good faith, they're unlikely to know anything about the candidates. Not assuming good faith, they looked like socks. SarahSV ^(talk) 22:15, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm hoping this isn't some kind of Sad/Rabid Puppies situation. It would be entirely in character for members of the pro-Gamergate crowd (or similar activists) to put forth some kind of coordinated mischief directly affecting Arb vote counts. BusterD (talk) 22:40, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

In response to SarahSV, I think it has to do wiht the new talk page notifications. With regards to your comment, BusterD, if such a thing would happen, I don't really know what could be done. Any eligible user has the right to vote, and gathering a group to vote in a particular way is not particularly punishable or out of the rules. It could be inappropriate, yes, but not punishable unless sockpuppets are involved. → Call me Hahc21 22:54, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Given that voters must be in good standing and have 150 main space edits before November 1, I think that it is unlikely that any organized campaign of disruption is at work here. Eligible voters got a talk page notice. If their account is configured to notify them by email when they receive a new talk page message, they found out immediately about the election without logging in. My wife is eligible to vote but an infrequent editor. She knew about the election before I mentioned it because she got an email about the notice on her talk page. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 23:08, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm pretty much with Cullen on this. It would be pretty hard to motivate a large group to get above 150 edits before Nov.1 to influence the election. It's much the same with sockpuppets. The stewards or scrutineers have temporary powers that should allow them to detect sockpuppetting among the voters, so let's say that each banned editor might be able to vote once? Probably not enough to affect the election.

This is not to say that I didn't entertain some of the doubts expressed above. I did check out about 5 voters on the first day, and just checked about 8 today. For the most part I'm very impressed with our editor/voters. They even seem a cut above the folks who hang out at User talk:Jimbo Wales. Maybe the folks who do the least complaining do the most editing and are the most qualified to edit. That said I noticed 4 voters total who don't have a user page, that's about 30% of the number checked. The 1st day I though maybe the last characters of the username might be getting cutoff in the log, but I checked further and it's not the case. In one case the user had never made a user page, but does have a talk page and 197 edits in article space since 2009 (about half this year). So I'll suggest trusting with verification - the scrutineers should do the verification of course. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:43, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Smallbones, there are two issues. First is whether the electorate is informed. Reading candidates' statements doesn't tell you much, and that those pages would even be looked at by occasional editors is doubtful.

The second issue is deliberate deception. Someone suggested that gamergate people may have set up accounts – and it needn't be them; it could be some other group wanting to influence things – so I hope the scrutineers will look for blocks of votes from occasional editors for or against a particular candidate. But I wonder whether the scrutineers have the time and expertise to do that work. SarahSV ^(talk) 00:55, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

First is whether the electorate is informed. Reading candidates' statements doesn't tell you much, and that those pages would even be looked at by occasional editors is doubtful. That seems more of an issue with the nature of an open election (same for the second issue). Even experienced editors rely on candidate statements and the answers to questions posed to them by the community to decide who should be on the committee. clpo13_(talk) 01:01, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

2,650 votes (not voters) by my most recent estimate. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:30, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

2503 unique voters. --kelapstick^(bainuu) 19:57, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

• There are indeed two ways of looking at the issues being discussed in this thread. The mass mailing was an extreme over-reaction to what has been considered too little turnout in previous years and it will almost certainly attract a lot of users who are ill informed about who or what they are voting for. On the other hand, however, the sheer number of votes generated by the action will almost certainly severely dilute or even negate any attempts at vote rigging. The results of this election although probably now more luck than judgement, will probably still closely resemble what they might have been under an electorate of regular established users, i.e. those who are pretty sure to pass, will; those who are pretty sure not to be elected won't be, and those who are borderline might go either way. Whatever happens, ACE will continued to be a flawed system as long as the choice is restricted to just 20 or so candidates who consider themselves qualified and are brave (or stupid) enough to stand. We have less than a year to get it right next time. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:39, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Well, when there are informed users who choose to Oppose all candidates or vote a "Hasten the Day" slate of candidates (voting for those individuals they think will be most disruptive or ineffectual), I think that the choices of casual editors' choices might be superior and more thoughtful. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 10:05, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Until we get rid of the entire genre of over-influential voter guides, some of which are apparently based on who has met which candidate at global meetups, we can be guaranteed the same tired old, revanchist waxworks for Arbcom. Any candidate need not worry in the slightest when they have high profile supporters turning a blind eye to behaviour that would doom an RFA to certain failure. Leaky Caldron 11:24, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

• 2790 voters (not votes) by my last estimate. I have no idea how @Kelapstick: gets an accurate count of votes, but he might do it again if he's online. I promise I'll only do one more count - after the polls close.Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:07, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

The issues in the last few comments probably deserve some discussion before the next election. Now might be a good time to start the discussion, but I'll ask that nobody use this as a springboard to claim that "the whole thing was fixed." I haven't seen any evidence of that. I'm sure there are folks (perhaps on other websites) that will claim that, no matter what the evidence is.

I was surprised that all eligible voters were informed via talkpages. As I remember the RfC it was to be for folks who were active in the last year or two. That should be how we do it next year. In general I'm in favor of more voters rather than less, and consider arguments in favor of limiting the turnout to be elitist. There is a tradeoff however that involves informing accounts that might be hacked, or were only used by sockpuppets, so I think limiting the notices to those with a cetain number of edits in the last year or two would be useful.

As far as the voters' guides - I consider that to have been the dirtiest part of this election. Guides obviously do help inform voters on the issues, but most guides did not seem to try to do that - rather it mostly did seem to be about the person rather than the issue. The dirty part IMHO opinion was that there were many guides that came in after the election started that seemed to mimic one another, essentially shouting down their opposition and making other voices hard to find. I have no idea how to stop that from happening again, but we might consider not having any linked guides if that is how our supposedly informed editors act. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:07, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

The dearth of real discussion of the very grave issues facing Wikipedia generally and ArbCom specifically is a great shame. It is also the natural and doubtless intended outcome of a election system that limits candidates to 400 words, spreads questions to candidates across 20 pages no one reads, and publicizes narrow-minded and shallow "voter guides", and provides negligible discussion. The entire discussion of one current arbitrator at the end of a very controversial term runs to a single sentence and a spam question. MarkBernstein (talk) 18:29, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Smallbones, it's 2674 unique voters. I just copy the voting log into excel, then remove duplicates by username. Nothing to it really. --kelapstick^(bainuu) 03:25, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

SecurePoll is frustrating if you accidentally lose your page

If you're in the process of voting, and you accidentally navigate away from the page by clicking on a link, you can't simply click the back button to go back and have your progress saved. SecurePoll seems obsessed with making sure that the page is regenerated with each page load. So, when I accidentally loaded a page in that tab and hit back, I lost all progress, and all candidates were re-ordered -- now I have to re-review all of my choices again and double check everything, to make sure I'm not screwing up my vote. It should definitely at least keep the ordering on a per-account basis of the page. Randomize it once and leave it set -- don't change it each page load. Lucas "nicatronTg" Nicodemus (talk) 20:20, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Screenshot your votes! That's what I did. :) --Monochrome_Monitor 23:20, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

I would've done that if I wasn't halfway through the page on my first attempt. I had a buggy mouse that was deciding to send clicks without me clicking, and my replacement had yet to arrive. Not fun! Lucas "nicatronTg" Nicodemus (talk) 17:39, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Arbcom elections

On vote.wikimedia.org, I am attempting to submit different votes, discarding my earlier votes, and being told I need to log in to vote, when this wiki states on the main page that registration is not required and it is only meant for a limited number of accounts. When I go to vote, it says "Welcome, Rubbish computer", so I have no idea whether or not I am logged in. Please advise. Thanks, --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 23:19, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

@Rubbish computer: Are you using the link on votewiki? It doesn't work (knowish bug), you need to go through Special:SecureVote on this site. Mdann52 (talk) 09:08, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

@Mdann52: Okay, thanks. Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 10:58, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

That should be Special:SecurePoll. The bottom "Vote" link there goes to Special:SecurePoll/vote/398, the link I gave you at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 142#Arbcom elections. Pages like https://vote.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/560 will sometimes display https://vote.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Securepoll-not-logged-in which only says "You must log in to vote in this election". Maybe it should be more specific. I don't know the general rules and scenarios but it might add something like "If you wish to vote then log in to your home wiki or the wiki the election is for, and go to Special:SecurePoll at that wiki. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:17, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: Thanks, I've voted now. --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 17:27, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

I've made a change to the interface to hopefully make this clearer. Thanks all, Mdann52 (talk) 19:19, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

Voting screen

(I have voted now.) The list of candidates on the voting screen is in a random order. The order is different from the order of the candidate statements, and is not alphabetical either. This made it annoying to find the right name in the list. Axl ¤ [Talk] 13:41, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

• The order of candidates is randomized on both the voting ballot and the statements page. Not having it randomized would be unfair. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 18:24, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
  • And if you go back and vote a second time (which wipes out your first vote) you will be facing a list that is most likely in a completely different order than when you voted the first time. And it won't tell you who you voted for the first time. Wish they could fix that without sacrificing the security of the ballot. As for randomizing the names on the ballot, I agree with Salvidrim, it is fairer that way, even if it is irritating. Neutron (talk) 23:12, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
    • Agreed that it is irritating. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:52, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

I believe marketing or political studies have shown that people often have a preference for names at the top of the list and lose interest as they work down a list of names. It is equitable to randomize the candidates' names so that an editor with the username ZZZZer doesn't face a disadvantage for being at the bottom of the list. Think of it this way, a voter wants to support 9 candidates and they select their candidates and when they come to the end of the list they think, "Well, I've already selected 9, I'll Oppose/Vote Neutal for these last candidates." Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:58, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Brigading by /r/KotakuInAction

The GamerGate subreddit KotakuInAction have linked to the ArbCom election with the intent to stop canditates who "are gender gap editors, gonna discriminate against white men and force gender issues into every[thing]". Delta Tango • Talk 16:23, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Yet to vote in the ArbCom election validates its election process. Thus the vociferous complainers there won't bother to vote, nor will they influence their like-minded readers to do so. Axl ¤ [Talk] 16:29, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Unless they're already active here, they'll have to go back in time and clock up 150 mainspace edits before Nov 1 before they can vote. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 16:32, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

KiA/Gamergate are one of the most ineffectual and useless Wikipedia brigading forces the world has ever seen, whose main talent seems to be shooting themselves in the collective foot. As such I wouldn't be particularly worried. Especially given that every single eligible voter is being mass messaged already so it would be almost impossible for this to actually have any effect.Brustopher (talk) 16:38, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

The coordinated Gamergate campaign to game this election has been underway for weeks. They're very well aware of the edit requirements, which have been discussed at the top of each of the pertinent threads. They've also got at least one Twitter blast planned for Dec 5. I’m less sanguine than @Brustopher: about their ineffectuality, though I agree this specific effort seems pointless. A good deal can be accomplished on Wikipedia through the kind of concerted and coordinated brigading and harassment that Gamergate carries out, and of course every political organization, propaganda agency, and PR firm has now studied the Gamergate playbook. MarkBernstein (talk) 18:16, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

A much better playbook on how to control Wikipedia topic areas has existed for over a year now (I shan't link to it for WP:BEANS reasons). The fact that Gamergaters have yet to use that playbook or even link to it on any of their major forums, is evidence of their terrible brigading skills. The harassment of course is a whole other kettle of fish, and has clearly been a serious problem which ought to be dealt with, but even this has failed to swing the content of the article in GG's favour from what I can see. They're the Wikipedia equivalent of a zerg rush, which is why 500/30 works so well. Brustopher (talk) 18:41, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Concur with Brustopher w.r.t zerg rush; still yet to be totally convinced on 500/30, but open minded (and do not hold its genesis against it).
The playbook that I see most commonly used had its 10th birthday just over a week ago, but remains remarkably effective.
As for the atrocity propaganda above, and various vague claims of extortion ... citation needed. - Ryk72 ^'c.s.n.s.' 21:32, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

It's hard for me to reconcile KIA's campaign when there is this 8chan/GamerGate EnWiki ArbCom Slate that lists Mark Bernstein at the top of their list of people to vote for. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:41, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

• Are you implying that otherwise eligible voters should be restricted from voting and/or voicing their opinions and encouraging others to vote? ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 18:26, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

It's fairly unlikely that they'll be able to conjure up enough individuals to significantly disrupt the results of the election, in any case; given the 150-edit threshold and necessity of having registered at least a month prior to the elections, there'll probably be only very few who are eligible to vote. In any case, it's the role of the scrutineers to deal with this (though the turnout this year is insane – already more than 2000 votes cast at last check, which is more than any in the past. Perhaps it's just because of the mass-talk page-messaging which was instituted this year in order to stimulate turnout, but it's likely that the ruling in the Gamergate case this year also left many who would otherwise have been disinterested to vote). 74.94.48.153 (talk) 20:00, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

While we should genuinely appreciate the work of the scrutineers in ensuring that editors do not vote multiple times, I'm not certain that "people who prefer the same candidates" is something that they should be dealing with. Of course, the scrutineers opinions may differ on this; if so, there are certainly more organised efforts far closer to home than KiA. - Ryk72 ^'c.s.n.s.' 21:38, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Maybe all of the cabals that people believe exist will cancel each other out? One can hope. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:42, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

I suppose it doesn't matter, as long as each vote is from a single person. I think the Scrutineers should be wary of votes from dormant accounts that are using masking techniques when voting. That should be a red flag. Other than that, votes are votes. And legitimate accounts that meet the criteria should have their votes counted just the same as everyone else. Dave Dial (talk) 22:14, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Waiting for results

How boring is my real life? I'm more excited about the pending results of this election, then I am of the pending arrival of Christmas. GoodDay (talk) 05:12, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

You don't need to wait. It's simple—average out the supports and opposes among the voter guides, and take the top nine. Nearly always works. Tony (talk) 07:43, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

And then take it to your local Ladbrookes with a bunch of fivers. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:06, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

I have already compiled this on my talk page because I wanted to see if the candidate guides, taken as a collective, provided a good predictor of election results. I have a feeling though that this year will be different because of the dramatic increase in turnout of voters. One could argue that less frequent editors are more likely to consult a candidate guide--because they don't know the candidates--or less likely--because they don't know that the guides exist or they are overwhelmed by how many there are!

I was looking at some figures, I believe it was at Wikipediocracy, about how many views the guides had received and it varied quite a bit. I believe WTT's was the most viewed guide but I'm sure the ones that were posted right after nominations closed received more views than those that were published later. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 17:05, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Distribution of edit counts for voters in each of the last three elections

• I don't know. I do find the chart on the right to be very curious. I'd be very interested to know why there is such a massive shift in edit counts of voters in the lower edit count editor area. --Hammersoft (talk) 18:26, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Talk page notifications this year (thanks to Mdann25, if I recall correctly); previously, the only notice of an impending ArbCom election that users would receive would be a site-wide banner, and I believe it didn't even take into account whether users were eligible to vote and it was also fairly unobtrusive. 74.94.48.153 (talk) 19:53, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

About voters

Disclaimer: home work, nothing official.

Voters by seniority

2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
2	8	41	149	262	457	274	232	198	191	189	183	173	184	131	2674

Voters by editcountiti (e.g. #(150<=x<300)=303)

300	600	1200	2400	4800	9600	19200	38400	76800	153600	307200	614400	1228800
303	405	323	329	245	232	263	259	201	88	21	3	2	2674

Voters by date of last vote (validity not asserted)

date	11-23	11-24	11-25	11-26	11-27	11-28	11-29	11-30	12-01	12-02	12-03	12-04	12-05	12-06	ALL
voters	499	718	410	152	113	86	92	110	106	90	63	58	74	103	2674
admn	117	43	30	15	6	13	10	8	18	9	7	6	14	15	311
avg(titi)	28998	9624	13672	12578	12852	9623	13013	12885	11953	12590	16094	12694	17324	23450	15572

There was some panic among some of the we, the village people for being overflowed by they, the holidaymakers people. As usual, panic doesn't describe the external reality. But one cannot exclude that such panic was nevertheless describing something. Pldx1 (talk) 10:44, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Very interesting, Pldx1, although it must have been very time-consuming to pull this together. Two questions though: does admn mean admins who voted that day? And is avg(titi) the average number of edits for editors who voted that day? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 17:10, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes. voters is the number of voters for that day, while admn is the number of admins among them. And avg(titi) is the average over all the voters. By the way, I am satisfied that all candidates I have voted for have voted themselves. Pldx1 (talk) 18:34, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

And now, another graph. Powtwo is the top of the class, i.e. powtwo=300 means that 150<=x<300. Counts are scaled to provide the same total (the 2015 one).

The key fact about this graph (and the similar ones) is that editcountitis are those currently provided by the API, i.e. are describing the 2015-12-08 situation. When dealing with 10 years users, one can guess that x(2014)=0.9*x(2015), providing not too bad digits for the 2014-12-08 situation. When dealing with one year users, the guesses are panic-biased: there are so few low editcountitis in the 2014 graph because, one year later, most of these voters moved to the right of the graph! Moreover, those editcountitis are the all_spaces ones, not only the main_space ones. May be another bias when discussing about writers. Pldx1 (talk) 10:46, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Kirill & Keilana: President & VP of WMDC

Two of the current election candidates have been chosen to the Board of Directors of Wikimedia DC, Kirill Lokshin as the President and Keilana as the Vice-President. ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 17:19, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

• I don't see a major problem with this. Kirill has a lot of institutional memory to bring to the committee, and Keilana has a more than solid head on her shoulders. I think it's probably to be expected that some arbcom members will be affiliated with other movement organizations. Honestly, I'm surprised that this was brought up before Keilana's affiliation with NIOSH was, lol (not that I view either of them as an issue.) Kevin Gorman (talk) 17:52, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Yeah, as long as they don't get any position of responsibility inside the Wikimedia Foundation itself, I don't see any problem. → Call me Hahc21 18:06, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
• To clarify, Keilana and I were already part of the WMDC board (and have been for some time); the only change is that I am now the president, having previously been the secretary. Kirill Lokshin (talk) 18:26, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

I have a vague memory of a precedent where a sitting Arb was appointed to a (paid?) WMF or Chapter position. It sparked some discussion about whether this was a conflict of interest. Somewhat unhelpfully, I cannot now remember: (i) who it was, (ii) when it happened, or (iii) what the outcome was. Is that enough to prompt someone's memory of what I'm thinking of? WJBscribe (talk) 18:09, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Offhand, I can recall two cases, both involving paid staff:

• Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry was asked by Wikimedia UK to step down as an arbitrator when he was hired there ([1]).
• Coren remained an arbitrator after taking a contract engineering position with the WMF ([2]).

Were you thinking of one of these? Kirill Lokshin (talk) 18:26, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I think I'd blurred the two in my memory. Does the DC Chapter have any issue with you and Keilana serving on ArbCom if elected? WJBscribe (talk) 18:39, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

The chapter is aware of our candidacies, and has no issue with us serving on ArbCom in the event that one or both of us were to be elected.

(By way of additional context, I was part of the WMDC board during my 2011–13 ArbCom term, and there were no concerns raised from either side at the time. I recused from one case because it involved an individual with whom I was working in my WMDC role, and would do so in the future if a similar situation arose, but the scenario is not one that occurs often.) Kirill Lokshin (talk) 18:48, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

• I've just been made aware that Gamaliel is also a member of the WMDC Board of Directors, apologies for not realizing or mentioning it earlier, the fault is on me. I also purposefully did not make any comment as to the intersection of WMDC and ArbCom (potentially) roles and purely posted it here for the interest of those who might wish to discuss it. (EDIT: just to preempt any OUTING accusations, Gamaliel recently penned a post on the Official Wikimedia Blog signed with his real name linking to his userpage -- and it's quite a interesting read too! ^_^) ☺ · Salvidrim! · ✉ 19:07, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi, I don't see any conflict particularly - obviously if someone I've worked with closely in any context, WMDC or no, is involved in a case, I'd recuse. Best, Keilana (talk) 22:34, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for your disclosure. While it's a moot point for me since I already voted for you, I have a question: would you recuse in the event of a conflict between Wikimedia (broadly construed) and the community, similar to the Kww/VisualEditor business? Blythwood (talk) 02:14, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikimedia DC and Wikimedia broadly construed are very different things. WMDC is a volunteer organization that runs off 20k a year, Wikimedia is a global movement that runs off >75m a year. Kevin Gorman (talk) 03:47, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Your precious results have been a leakèd

no they haven't. Mdann52 (talk) 16:37, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
You may see the results now. They have been a leakèd. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.115.112.190 (talk) 23:23, 7 December 2015 (UTC) If this is true, are the result compromised? --I am One of Many (talk) 23:37, 7 December 2015 (UTC) I'm pretty sure more than 2070 people voted. PeterTheFourth (talk) 23:39, 7 December 2015 (UTC) As I noted above, there were over 2600 unique voters, that is not to say that they were all eligible. --kelapstick(bainuu) 23:40, 7 December 2015 (UTC) Troll food. Opabinia regalis (talk) 23:57, 7 December 2015 (UTC) This image was posted on the subreddit WikiInAction which is a forum devoted to criticizing Wikipedia and is associated with Gamergate subreddit KotakuInAction. I would not consider any information from this discussion forum to be coming from a reliable source. Liz Read! Talk! 00:51, 8 December 2015 (UTC) As much as I like the idea of Keilana getting the highest vote count, I really doubt this is accurate. Particularly me beating out Casliber? Kevin Gorman (talk) 00:54, 8 December 2015 (UTC) For the record: These are faked, WMF Ops and I have reviewed and I am incredibly confidant that the results have not been revealed. The votes remain encrypted and the Scrutineers continue their account review process. Jalexander--WMF 01:30, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom election results live

Grapes! Grapes for all! Grapes of success, grapes of wrath, sour grapes – something for everyone.

Hi all,

Just a note to say the ArbCom election have now concluded, and results have been posted. 9 Arbs have been elected in total, 8 on two-year terms and 1 on a one-year term. You can review the results in full here.

For the Election Commission, Mdann52 (talk) 19:20, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Congratulations to those who were elected and the best of luck to you on ArbCom. Wildthing61476 (talk) 19:21, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Anyone care to explain how the "net" math works and all the numbers are the same (2674) and larger than any other number? Were they scrutineered or am I missing something? --DHeyward (talk) 19:26, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

@DHeyward: net simply = support+oppose+neutral (shows that everyone had equal votes in essence) Mdann52 (talk) 19:28, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

The text under the table does read "2. ^ Net = Support − Oppose". I can see where the confusion might lie. Wildthing61476 (talk) 19:30, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

You're right, I copied the wrong column :/ fixed now! Mdann52 (talk) 19:35, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Congratulations & condolenses, to those who were fortunate & misfortunate to get elected. To all the candidates, thumbs up for sticking your necks out to begin with :) GoodDay (talk) 19:42, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

• Congratulations, y'all. I'm quite excited about these results :) Kevin Gorman (talk) 20:20, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

The results are surprising...but, frankly, given the huge turnout, the results could have been much more inexplicable!
I collated the candidate guides and among the candidates who received the most support from the guide writers, 6 out of 9 of their picks resonated with the voters' preference. The one take-away from this election is that to a significant number of voters, it is still important for arbitrators to have administrative experience. I thought a non-admin would crack the Top 9 but not this year. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:05, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

I think an exceptionally strong non-admin candidate would overcome the opposition. I think that person would also have to be focused deeply on content rather than dramaz. Hawkeye7 wasn't far off really, and in fact has more supports than one of the elected individuals. Probably his past just tipped the balance? The other non-admin options simply weren't strong enough to overcome the community view against non-admin arbs (personal opinion; they weren't strong candidates anyway even as admins). Happily all 9 elected arbs match my selections! Well done to them! And commiserations to those who didn't quite make it. --Errant ^(chat!) 21:51, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

There is little doubt that tipped the balance; but there may have been some voters who were opposed to electing a non-admin. Hawkeye7 (talk) 20:26, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the commiserations - Arbcom is not the UK Championship which throughout served as a massive relief to the tedium of the election. As a candidate - who by the way was never entirely sold on wanting to be on the Committee - the most important thing was participating. It helped highlight some of the weaknesses and incongruities of the process which now need to be addressed. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:29, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Statement from WMF re results

As the Manager for the Trust & Safety team for the Legal and Community Advocacy department at the Wikimedia Foundation, my duties include overseeing the technical component of this election. Based upon my experience and technical expertise, I certify that to the best of my knowledge, any deficiencies of process were inconsequential to the voting itself and had no impact on votes cast. I was also charged to hold the private key to decrypt results. During the election itself the key existed only in a locked safe in the WMF offices with access granted only to myself and Luis Villa (Senior Director of Community Engagement). After the election was over the key existed only in the safe and encrypted on my work laptop until I inserted it into the database (which was logged in our operations log) and results run.

I believe:

• the election to have been fairly and properly executed;
• that the scrutineers and administrators were properly constituted and valid, and
• that they performed their duties appropriately and with diligence.
• I would also like to congratulate (or commiserate for depending on your view) the winners, thank all those who ran (that, in itself, is not easy) and call out the invaluable help of everyone involved in this years election especially Ori Livneh's help with the voter list. Jalexander--WMF 19:22, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your oversight, Jalexander. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:00, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Where can I see my votes?

Now that the voting is over I'd like to see my votes again (to compare it with the results). How can I do that? --Fixuture (talk) 22:41, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure that you can, actually. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:42, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

The trick is to take a screenshot of your voting page Too late for that now, though! --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:37, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

• Or, you could go retro by useinga pencil and paper to write them down. Pencils/paper are still available at some old-fashioned outlets called "stationery stores". Or your grandmother may have them in a drawer somewhere. EEng (talk) 05:12, 10 December 2015 (UTC) P.S. Please note you can't use a screenshot to collect any voting bribes promised you, since there's no way to prove you actually hit <Submit>.

Seriously?! It's not possible? Could that please be changed? Or is it deliberately not featured to prevent bribery as described by User:EEng? (If so maybe one could add a "save current votes" button on the voting page from the next vote on which would allow one to re-access one's votes without being able to prove those being the final, counted votes.) --Fixuture (talk) 20:07, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Oh the neutrality!

Great section heading! EEng (talk) 15:23, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Does anyone else thinks it's odd that all but one of the elected arbs had over 1,000 "neutrals" and one of them had more than twice as many neutrals as supports? I assumed more particpation would mean more actual, you know, voting. Too much to digest, maybe? Beeblebrox (talk) 00:51, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

With more than half the voting neutral for me, I feel like the Switzerland of ACE2015. --kelapstick^(bainuu) 00:59, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

The terse and tepid candidate statements, Signpost coverage that was completely devoted to bureaucratic concerns and dubious statistics, and the very dubious tradition of “voter guides” equally devoted to inside baseball and ignoring the serious issues that (I believe) threaten the future existence of the project, doubtless left many voters completely baffled. MarkBernstein (talk) 01:15, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Sounds a lot like real-world elections. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:44, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Or, Mark, we could say that the voters weren't idiots or played for fools and instead voted for the candidates they thought would be good members of an arbitration committee. Who says that voters were "baffled"?Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:22, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

The vast piles of neutral votes, Liz. MarkBernstein (talk) 03:28, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Neutral does not equate to baffled. If a person is baffled by a candidate, they would vote oppose, all things being equalled. Who wants arbs that are baffling, when clarity is essential? If a person is baffled by the election procedures, then they won't vote. That they voted, and that they voted neutral, is in fact an interesting result: my hunch is that the neutral-votes were an honest-electorate mechanism (as opposed to tactical voting in which one casts supports and opposes partly based on geopolitick), for the voters to submit their preference that Other Wikipedians should make the call for that particular candidate. In a race with over twenty candidates, and plenty of grey areas, and lots of complex issues, this is entirely natural: some voters will be more familiar with particular candidates than others, inherently. Some voters will be more attuned to the inside baseball scoreboard and statistics-book.

  Voting neutral is a way of saying, let people more certain about their stances on this particular candidate, be the ones who decide how well this particular candidate does. In a one-winner two-party election, like the USA has for most elected federal government positions, there *is* a way to vote neutral: by staying home. That's not even counting the major-party-primaries-and-caucuses, where 9 out of 10 eligible voters stay home. In a nine-winner approval-voting election, voting neutral is saying "meh" rather than saying "I am baffled". There were 107k eligible voters, and 2600 of them voted: the apathy is strong, here on-wiki. "Meh" is sometimes exactly the correct thing to say, especially when there are nine seats and more than twice that many candidates. I for one, welcome our new apathetically-elected insect overlords.  ;-)     75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:42, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Well quite. Perhaps Mark believes that non-baffled editors would have endorsed him, though I must admit that insulting the electorate is a strange way of building support for the future. pablo 20:10, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

• This year's election clearly demonstrates that the process is more than ready for an overhaul. Not only, but in particular the question and discusion sections where users are allowed to make gratuitous PA at candidates including accusing them of being misogynists, eccentrics, physical bullies, and child molesters, and generally over-americanising and forgetting that the en.Wiki is an international, multi-cultural project. Yes, Smallbones, we have less than a year to get it right. It's bad enough having RfA as the main venue where traditionally users are allowed to be as spiteful and disingenuous as they like with total impunity. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:13, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

What exactly do you mean by "over-americanising"? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:22, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

He probably means "over-americanizing".  :-) Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:36, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Probably doesn't, Smallbones, and the emphasis was on the wild accusations of misogyny and other PA. Using occasions such as an Arbcom election for socio-political platforming, is IMHO, a disgrace. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:52, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Why do you associate "wild accusations of misogyny", PA and "socio-political platforming" with America? And where did all of this occur during the election, I seemed to have missed this drama. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 12:49, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

The high number of neutral votes is entirely due to the fact that roughly 75% to 80% of the voters are new and did not understand that voting "support" for your preferred candidates and "oppose" to everyone else is the way to exercise maximum voting power in this particular type of election. A "neutral" vote in this case is a commendable assumption of good faith by new voters. In my opinion, this dramatically enlarged electorate showed very good judgment in general. So much for the wailing and gnashing of teeth in recent weeks. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 02:30, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Correct. A neutral vote means "I'm not aware of anything particularly damnable nor commendable about this person, and will leave the judgement to those who are". It's actually a better Good Faith approach than opposing everyone you don't know. Not min-maxing != confused.-- Elmidae 12:44, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

I just voted to vote against MarkBarnstein ;) Loganmac (talk) 07:47, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

• The number of neutral votes isn't hugely higher than previously, looking at the past 5 elections shows percentages of 50% (2015), 35% (2014), 45% (2013), 38% (2012), and 35% (2011) for average neutral vote over number of voters. Sam Walton (talk) 08:45, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

The fact is that the current voting system is unknown and unprecedented in the real world so its possible disadvantages are unknown to us. I couldn't find any academic book or journal article about this very voting system. The Persian Wikipedia Community is considering using the "best" multi-winner (multiple-winner elections as opposed to single-winner elections) voting system which we think is Meek STV. Social choice has lots of mysterious aspects that laymen may not be aware of. Let professors and experts do their job and introduce us the most appropriate multi-winner voting system.

I have found out that the following organizations use Meek STV for their elections: Stack Exchange, Apache Board of Directors, LOPSA (2015), Document Foundation, Zope Foundation, and London Hackspace. Meek STV is also used in local elections in New Zealand. For more information, please take a look at my post on Risker's talk page at Meta. I strongly recommend that you consider electoral reform.

The other problem is disenfranchising those who are not familiar enough to cast a well-informed vote. We must tighten eligibility criteria. Here are my proposed modifications. 4nn1l2 (talk) 11:51, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

I think that the number of voters who were "well-informed" about ALL of the candidates is very small. Many people relied on candidate guides because they weren't familiar with some of the candidates. And you can't assume that an editor who is well-informed will pick the most qualified candidates (as if there is agreement about that either!). Some editors who did know the candidates chose to Oppose all of them, chose not to vote at all or voted HTD (Hasten the Day), a platform of selecting the candidates who would cause the most disruption.

Even considering number of edits or length of time that an editor has been active on Wikipedia, it is impossible to tell if someone is well-informed about the candidates or what even "informed" means. I mean, does exchanging talk page comments mean that an editor is informed about another editor? What about being in a dispute with another editor, does that qualify being informed about them?

I mean, say you restricted voting to editors who had been active for 5 years and had at least 20,000 edits, how do you know that an editor has read over statements, looked at Q&As, examined a candidate's contributions...or if they voted based on their impression that a candidate is a good person or a "net negative"? It could be that a new editor decided to study the candidates before voting while a longtime editor voted based on their gut feeling. It is impossible for anyone to assess how well-informed another editor is, what their intentions are when casting a vote or what their voting decisions are based on. I don't think the results of this election demonstrate a need for "tightening" eligibility criteria. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 13:12, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Liz, you are referring to tactical voting. The current system allows casting a strategic/tactical vote based on a HTD platform or some other platforms. There are some better systems which reduce the incentive to cast a strategic vote such as Meek STV. I know some Persian Wikipedia users who voted in the English ArbCom elections but I'm sure they cannot read English text. They may have created their global account in English Wikipedia (just like myself) so you may not recognize them easily. A user who has edited Wikipedia frequently is more probable to actually care about Wikipedia and cast a well-informed vote. Conversely, a user who has just 150 edits is more probable not to bother to read the statements and just cast a random vote. We are not talking about some strange cases because everything in not in our control. We are talking about probability. 4nn1l2 (talk) 15:11, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

I see nothing astonishing about this, given that the default vote was neutral. You had to take action to move it away from neutral. Ascribing any underlying reason to this is beyond ridiculous. It's just how the system worked. If you made it so a voter had to actively do something to vote 'neutral', then it would be on equal ground with oppose/support. As is, it's just a bit bucket for those who didn't move it from neutral. Hardly surprising. Come on people. We've got better things to do than this. --Hammersoft (talk) 13:38, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Thought experiment: at my college, we had a House System where students could ask for membership in a new House at any time. There were three possible votes: "Yes", "No", and "Who?", meaning that the voter didn't know the candidate well enough. If "Who?" got a majority, the prospective member would fail regardless of the Yes–No vote.

Say that rule were applied to this election. Half the total number of votes is 1337 (no kidding), meaning that nine of the candidates would have been disqualified, and Kelapstick and Callanecc would have been replaced with Hawkeye7 and Rich Farmborough. So it would favor candidates about whom people had strong opinions, even if those that meant more oppose votes, which I'm not sure is desirable. Increasing the cutoff from 50% to just 58.5% would give the current results, and at various intermediate cutoffs you could end up with slates replacing Rich with either Kudpung or Thryduulf. Looks like such a rule would have affected the 2013 results, but not any of the other recent ones. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 21:04, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

There was a lot of discussion while the voting was in progress about whether the mass notifications, and the resulting increase in voter turnout, would affect the results. My guess is that the new voters probably accounted for most of whatever increase there was in the number of neutrals, but that otherwise, the results probably weren't all that different than what they would have been without the notifications.

As for the neutrals, I guess I would rather see an informed support or oppose vote in place of a neutral, but I would rather see a neutral vote in place of an uninformed support or oppose. Having neutrals is probably the worst possible system except for all the others. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:35, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Arbs and scrutineers

Congratulations (or commiserations?) to new Arbitrators.

And a huge congratulations and thanks to the scrutineers for such a quick result.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 12:47, 10 December 2015 (UTC).

What Rich said, and adding thanks to the election commission. NE Ent 12:51, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Absolutely. And also a big thank you for the unsuccessful candidates for their efforts. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 16:48, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

I agree! And I think that the prompt posting of the results reflects particularly well on how the scrutineers stayed on top of the process, especially in the context of the high voter turnout. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:29, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Voting guides

There's lots of talk above about how the voters were not properly informed. There were 28 voters guides included on the green election template. Only 23 are included below because I couldn't make out clear "supports" or "opposes" on the other 5. Editors might check my counting abilities - collecting this data was pretty tedious.

• "Supports" elected is a count of the number of "supports" a guide declared, where the candidate supported then got elected
• "Opposes" not elected is a count of the number of opposes a guide declared, where the candidate opposed did not then get elected.
• Total recommendations is the total number of supports + opposes. It does not count "neutrals" or withdrawn candidates
• Percentage "correct" is [("Supports" elected + "Opposes" not elected)/ Total recommendations]
• Views total is the number of views between 8 Nov and 6 Dec.

I won't say one measure is better than another for rating the informativeness of the guides, but I think "Supports" elected indicates fairly well that the guide was in line with voters' views. I would have thought that "Percentage correct" would have come the closest to being the best indicator of informativeness, but after looking at the 3 guides (my own included) that are rated at 75%, I can see some problems with using that indicator alone.

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:02, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Voters' guide	"Supports" elected	"Opposes" not elected	Total recommendations	Percentage "correct"	Views total	8 Nov 22 Nov	23 Nov 6 Dec
Reaper Eternal	8	9	19	89.5%	2175	1680	495
Elonka	8	8	19	84.2%	1924	1356	568
Smallbones	8	7	20	75.0%	1739	1000	739
Fuzheado	7	11	20	90.0%	431*	0	431
Carcharoth	7	9	20	80.0%	495*	0	495
Tryptofish	7	8	20	75.0%	1915	1450	465
Boing! said Zebedee	7	8	19	78.9%	851*	3	848
Worm That Turned	7	7	17	82.4%	3652	2645	1007
HJ Mitchell	7	7	17	82.4%	1730	1100	630
Yngvadottir	6	7	18	72.2%	1015*	491	524
The owner of all	5	7	18	66.7%	575*	0	575
MONGO	5	6	17	64.7%	846*	326	520
RegentsPark	5	5	14	71.4%	1337	974	363
Sjakkalle	5	5	15	66.7%	674*	277	397
Bishzilla	4	10	17	82.4%	2281	1434	847
Carrite	4	8	20	60.0%	1656	857	799
Begoon	4	8	20	60.0%	895*	399	496
Ealdgyth	4	8	16	75.0%	2821	2345	476
Peter Damian	4	7	20	55.0%	2242	1584	658
AGK	4	6	15	66.7%	–	–	–
MZMcBride	4	5	20	45.0%	279	0	279
SB Johnny	3	11	20	70.0%	506	0	506
Pldx1	2	6	19	42.1%	810	447	363
Collect	4	n/a	n/a	n/a	1872	n/a	n/a

• With all respect, given that voter guides were not prediction guides, I fail to see the point of this table. It's like judging cars at being boats. --Hammersoft (talk) 18:01, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Actually there was one guide that stated its findings as predictions rather than recommendations. I left it out, as I couldn't figure out what he was trying to accomplish :-). The question that I want to address here is whether the guides helped inform voters and were there any differences in the guides that seem to have informed voters and those that seemed to have been rejected by voters. Think of 2 Consumer guides to automobiles, if Guide 1 recommends car models 1, 2, 3 and Guide 2 recommends car models 4, 5, and 6; we might be able to say something about the usefulness of the Guides if consumers chose car models 1, 2, and 7. In particular we might wonder whether Guide 2 was more of an advertisement than a consumer guide. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:13, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

My opinion is that these "guides" represent a real threat to what should be an impartial process. They are, in effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more accurate they are, the more voters will simply follow there preferred voter guide the following year. Some of these guides actually proclaim in less than neutral terms why the author's particular guide might be followed. Some are based purely on some token friendship, gut feel or hairs on the back of the neck. There should be a RFC on the validity and neutrality of these guides, or else we might as well just use them to source the results. Forget the voting. Leaky Caldron 18:20, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Actually the table shows that the voters did *not* just follow the guides.

There are two guides that show what I'm trying to get at here. Fuzheado's and Collect's. Fuzheado just listed 7 candidates that he was voting for, and strongly suggested voting against all the rest. (I could have left off the "Opposes" not elected column for him since he actually didn't technically say he opposed specific candidate - in which case he would have had a 100% in the last column). Fuzheado's guide was a remarkable achievement. 7 recommendations which the voters apparently agreed with, based almost solely on his personal reputation. I'll argue that guide was quite informative.

With all due respect to Collect - who I personally like very much - his guide appears to have been quite uninformative. He focused on one fairly obscure and complicated topic that he was obviously involved with. He obviously did not convince the voters that it was important to know about. In that sense he failed to provide voters information that they thought was important.

That said, I do not mean to say that your "score in predicting the winners" is the only measure of informativeness. It is very possible to have important opinions expressed in a guide that the voters just don't connect with. The main point of a guide IMHO is to convince voters that you have the information that they need to know. Voters may disagree, even if the guide is "correct". 5 years later the voters might have wished that they had paid attention.

I hope this table is able to provide some indication of informativeness, but I doubt any numbers produced right after an election can give you the whole picture. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:54, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

I disagree. 9 voter guides correctly identified a minimum of 7 out of 9 successful candidates. What is it that I am missing? Why not tabulate supports not elected? Leaky Caldron 19:06, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

And 9 guides could only identify 4 or fewer winners. I feel that it's pretty easy to pick at least half of the winners, and wonder why those 9 weren't concentrating on candidates who had a chance of getting elected. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:27, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Smallbones, I appreciate your work here but honestly it's staring at tea leaves post facto. Deducing anything from this is not statistically supportable. It doesn't mean anything. There's no evidence, for example, that any voter looked at any of these guides. It could all be just pure dumb luck of the draw. We've no way of knowing. There's just no statistical validity to be obtained from anything on this. It's a completely uncontrolled experiment. I'm sorry. --Hammersoft (talk) 19:38, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Of course you can find evidence that people looked at these voters guides. In fact I can state with 100% confidence that some people did look at them. If your point is that this table couldn't get published in an academic journal, you are correct. If your point is that we shouldn't look at data if it couldn't be published in an academic journal, you are wrong. My only point is that it's fairly obvious that some of the guide writers weren't very interested in informing the voters. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:52, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Still interested: I supplied not a guide but a collection of answers, indicating clearly though for whom I voted, not as a recommendation or prediction but selfishly for my survival. (I survived arbitration, as you probably know.) How could I recommend, interests are different. For some a candidate mentioning "Arbitration enforcement is designed to be a sledgehammer" may be someone to support. - I voted for six, one withdrew, the other five were all elected, so I am pleased with the outcome. We have four women now, DYK? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:57, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

ps: just for fun I looked up the stats for my "not-a-guide": 800 in the last 30 days. Perhaps compare those numbers for the guides if you want to evaluate if they were used ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:01, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Candidate guides are not used for predictive purposes, the election is not a bet. They are written as advice to other editors on whom the author considers to be the best candidates to join the arbitrators on the committee. The usefulness of a table like this is just to see how "in sync" the authors are with the voters who participated in the election. There is no "right answer" here, there are just the choices of the candidate guide authors and the choices determined by a majority of the voters and how much or how little they were aligned.
And I think it is incorrect to imply all of the candidates Fuzheado didn't recommend were Opposes. He explicitly said he was only offering his Supports and for all we know, he could have been Neutral about the other candidates. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:26, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

I certainly did feel it was a close call on Fuzheado's "non-opposes". Following Liz's interpretation his results would have been

• Fuzheado 7 0 7 100%

which is still a pretty amazing achievement. (In fact the 100% makes it look like an even more amazing achievement - which is why I leaned the other way)

On Liz's main point - yes this is about guides and voters being in synch. Some of that likely has to do with how informative the voters thought the guides were. We should make an effort to make the guides more informative. Right now I don't have any idea how to do that en masse, maybe others have suggestions. On an individual level, we can ask guide writers next year to please keep your guides serious and informative.

Re:Gerda's "I am pleased with the outcome. We have four women now, DYK?" I think there's another currently on the committee, to make 5 total. I am pleased with the outcome. myself. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:59, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Let me learn math or about gender (not that I care too much which gender a good editor has): one woman is staying, one was confirmed, two were newly elected, that's four, no?

Whoops! I stand corrected. Thanks Gerda. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:21, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't mean to be so disagreeable, Smallbones, but I will disagree with you here. I think it is very important for a candidate guide to have a distinct point of view, the usefulness of a candidate guide for me is knowing who the author is and seeing who that author recommends. Different authors will value different qualities, some want experience and stability in an arbitration committee while others seek reform candidates. Some authors value strong content creators while others think a depth of administrative and mediation experience is essential.

If the guides merely try to predict the successful candidates, they won't be as useful because they will all rank the most popular candidates at the top which is predictable. What is more important to me is, knowing WTT, seeing who he recommended or seeing your criteria for recommending candidates and seeing who met your standards. To be helpful, a candidate guide shouldn't just be a list of names but are recommendations based on the priorities of the author. Then, I can tell which guides most represent my values and which ones I might not pay as much attention to. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:17, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Liz - you're not being disagreeable here. In fact I don't see much disagreement. I'll just quote myself from above:

" I do not mean to say that your "score in predicting the winners" is the only measure of informativeness. It is very possible to have important opinions expressed in a guide that the voters just don't connect with. The main point of a guide IMHO is to convince voters that you have the information that they need to know. Voters may disagree, even if the guide is "correct". 5 years later the voters might have wished that they had paid attention. I hope this table is able to provide some indication of informativeness, but I doubt any numbers produced right after an election can give you the whole picture." Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:57, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

When you break it down to the candidate level, it's interesting to see where the community concurred with the guides and where they did not. Guides that supported or rejected candidates solely based on experience and background generally matched who the community voted for. Guides that rejected certain candidates based on disagreement with certain issues or stances or perceived "agendas" found that the community did not share those stances, or did not agree that opposing those "agendas" was in fact a neutral, non-political stance. It seems the community at large does not share the same point of view on these issues as many of the vocal insiders who wrote the voter guides this year. Gamaliel (talk) 20:38, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

What I thought was interesting, Gamaliel, was that it was less important to the candidate guide authors, as a group, that candidates were admins than it was to the voters. To the voters, they cared more about the candidates having admin experience and passing an RfA which is kind of a traditional perspective, I think.

And, you're right, while quite a few candidate guides opposed candidates based on the perception that they cared about civility and were vocal against harassment, the bulk of the voters thought that these views were actually important. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:49, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

• Dear User:Smallbones. Are you that sure that one cannot make out clear "supports" or "opposes" from User:Pldx1/ACE2015 ? Pldx1 (talk) 22:15, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't look far enough down on your page. I just did a quick count and got 2 6 19 42.1% please check to see if I counted right. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:07, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Dear User:Smallbones. Yes, you are right. I am reluctant to modify a statement made by someone else in this kind of discussion. Will you introduce these figures in your table, or are you OK if I make the modif by myself ? Pldx1 (talk) 09:39, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Now included Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:03, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

• Sir,

I stated out the outset my criteria, and live by them. You seem to suggest I opposed all but two of the "winners" but since I only recommended 4 - the lumpiness is quite significant here.

Of the four I recommended, only one won - for a score of 25% based on specific criteria everyone knew about - not just one minor and unimportant topic but the nature of their view of the function of the committee. O

Of the 9 who were elected, I named 4 -- or 44% by your standards used for other guides - And judging guides by their poll value <g> is absurd at best and rather like saying Gallup makes good "voter guides" because they call the most races correctly.

Any voter guide which says "this person is likely to win" as their criterion for naming, and says "vote for those who will win" which then gets used by voters is ,in fact, a horrid thing to promote.

Anyone reading my guide will see my concerns were (1) what the candidates view as the ambit of the committee, (2) how strongly their belief is in absolute impartiality on the committee, and lastly (3) how the candidates view "equity" in decisions v. the "process" of decisions. That you conflate these three issues with being "one fairly obscure and complicated topic" rather regretfully suggests that you did not read my ACE page at all. Sigh.

And if we want guides to be "these are the preselected winners of a popularity contest" then they are useless - guides should indicate why people favour or oppose any candidates. The goal, in my misguided opinion, is free and frank discussion of the major real issues, which I sought to provide. With some cheers. Collect (talk) 22:59, 10 December 2015 (UTC) (some of the data in the table is clearly inapplicable to my guide - so emended to give a more accurate view thereof).

Collect you seem to misunderstand my counting method here. If you supported a candidate and then that candidate was elected, I count that for the "Supports" elected column. Your guide was difficult to read, but I took your "pass" and "recommended" as "supports". You then "supported" 10 candidates of whom 3, Drmies, Kirill Lokshin, and Opabinia regalis got elected. I took your "fail" and "No timely answers" as opposes - you named 10 in these categories, of which 4, Kudpung, Lfaraone, Mahensingha, and NE Ent were not elected. Thats

3 4 20 35.0% by my method

You may think that my method is not worthwhile, but for the table I'll use the same method for each guide. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:44, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

As I did not call "fail" and "no timely answer" an "oppose" you made a tremendous leap off a very tall cliff. As far as I can tell, I made no comments about personalities, admin status, health, etc. about the candidates, thus my guide should be valued and categorized solely on the basis on which it was made. I note you decided that "not applicable" was wrong where I clearly feel that "not applicable" is precisely the term which should be applied to your apparent desire to say "guides which predict how people vote are superior to guides which say that people should look at how the candidates think" . I ask you fix that apparent misconstrual of the purpose of my guide. You should also strike your snarky aside that the questions dealt with "one fairly obscure and complicated topic that he was obviously involved with" as that is clearly not what the questions were concerned with - as one actually reading my guide should certainly be aware. Collect (talk) 12:53, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Removed from table. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:03, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

WP:POINT applies here - I countered the snark above, thus becoming a non-person <g>. Re-added the actual pertinent figures. Cheers. Collect (talk) 18:39, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Most of the voters guide are using red to say oppose, green to say support and a third color to say neutral. Perhaps User:Collect was using these colors for many excellent other reasons, but one cannot exclude that most of the readers have used this simple color code to compile their own summary. This leads to 1 elected green, 4 not-elected red, 4 blue, giving 1;4;16; 31.3%. Views are 1755=1355+400. Pldx1 (talk) 20:17, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

On the other hand, perhaps reading what the guide actually says is better than using the proverbial "assume" system? Had I used puce and mauve, I likely would still have had people misconstrue what my guide was about - how candidates view the ambit of the committee, how strongly they view not just actual impartiality but the appearance thereof, and how strongly they revere process or revere equity, and noting whether they appear to have given actual thought to the issues. I fear/hope that the positions of the elected members will be confirmed in a current case before that committee. Collect (talk) 22:16, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

I went ahead and added a "views" column. A star was added when a guide was created late. Interestingly, most of the guides had similar views. Reaper Eternal (talk) 23:01, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:03, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

It makes sense to list the views during the nominations + questions period (8 Nov -- 22 Nov) and the voting period (23 Nov - 6 Dec), since the mass mailing occured during the later period. Pldx1 (talk) 17:46, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Uh, my guide wasn't added late. November 7th in fact. Ealdgyth - Talk 23:11, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Whoops, that wasn't supposed to be there. Reaper Eternal (talk) 04:12, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

To User:Smallbones: I did this kind of research for years, and you can see my conclusions at User:Hahc21/ACE. Interestingly, some of the people who have expressed their opposition to this kind of information in this thread also opposed me doing it a while ago, although it didn't stop me and shouldn't stop you. The bottom line here is that voter guides severely influence, and accurately predict, the result of ArbCom elections. Out of all the 5 elections I studied, guides successfully predicted somewhere around 90% of the elected candidates. And the trend can also be experienced this year. → Call me Hahc21 02:05, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll take a look. I had no idea it would cause such a storm. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:10, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Heh, they are going light on you. I had to face several lengthy threads of people in favour and against the so-called "guides to guides". What they failed to accomplish was to actually call my research a guide to guides, since all i was doing was to show some statistic data after the election was over. I am a bit sad that I did not do it for this year, and since I was a candidate last year, I couldn't do it then either. → Call me Hahc21 02:13, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Feel free to use whatever work of mine you'd like as a starting point, then make it and call it your own. If that's too fancy, then just feel free to check my work. I'm sure there's another small mistake or two in it. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:06, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Speaking only for myself, I made no attempt to predict the outcome in my guide. I suspect that some guides influence voters to some extent, but that relatively few voters simply follow any given guide right down the ballot. And I've got to believe that some guides are followed very little in the voting, but that they may be viewed a lot out of curiousity. This year, there were 20 candidates who remained on the ballot, so there is some statistical unreliability in using percentages for the guides that had fewer than 20 recommendations.

It seems to me that how the candidates presented themselves in their candidate statements and the answers to questions had a bigger influence than any of the guides did. I do think that there were strong non-administrator candidates this year, and that the voters made it very clear that they want arbs to be admins. I also think that voters indicated high enthusiasm, other things being equal, for female candidates. It's interesting that how candidates are perceived on controversies like the "vested contributor versus civility" controversy (for lack of a better name for it) did not predict the outcome, but rather voters supported candidates who seem kindly and level-headed over those who seem aggressive or combative. It also looks like voters considered incumbents seeking reelection on a case-by-case basis instead of voting as a block. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:50, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

It's a fine line. Too many guides are formulated on the answers they got to their questions, particulrly the answers that bore the truth rather tnan kowtowing to some pompous, veiled PA, and gratuitous accusations of misoginy and pederasty in order to get a favourable mention. Smallbones would know all about the kind of 'Have you stopped beating your wife?' questions for which there can never be a 'right' answer. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:33, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

In that case, the best answer is not to answer at all. Voters and participants are quick to recognize such frivolous questions, or at least that was my experience last year when I ran. Nobody is expecting you to answer every question, and is usually a good idea to let somebody else handle the personal attacks and accusations rather than doing it oneself. → Call me Hahc21 06:49, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

@Kudpung: has accused me several times of accusing him of misogyny and pederasty. I can't see at all what he's taking about with regard to pederasty. I'll let the reader be the judge from our interaction during the election. I can see why he might think I was accusing him of misogyny, but actually I was accusing him of ducking the question, which was essentially "People are saying that Wikipedia is misogynist. What can you do about it?"

Kudpung brought this to ANI during the election and they essentially said "this type of thing is a normal part of any election."

I'll request that Kudpung just drop the pederasty stuff. There's nothing there to support this at all. If he feels that my question on misogyny was too tough, he can take it to ArbCom - I won't object to them hearing it and deciding. Or if they won't hear it he might take it to Jimbo Wales, and I'll voluntarily take a full 30-day Wikibreak if JW thinks I overstepped the bounds of civility in the context of an election. I don't think there's really anything else to do other than just to drop it. Sincerely, Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:32, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Replying on your talk page.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:43, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Interesting data, Smallbones, thank you for compiling it. I'd also be interested in a table sorted by the candidates, meaning list each candidate, and how many guides supported them, and how many didn't, and then the % support that the candidate actually received? Anyway, I do agree with some of the commenters here that guides are not written to predict, but to advocate, but it's still interesting to see how some of the guides line up with community opinion. Lastly, I strongly agree that we should have another RfC on voter guides next year, to go over some of the points: (1) Should non-serious guides be allowed in the template? There was a consensus about this (that non-serious guides should not be included) back in 2011, but it seems to have been forgotten this year and caused a bit of a kerfuffle at the guide template, so we should probably re-check the consensus; and (2) Should guides be allowed that are simply exit polls listing how a particular person voted or intends to vote, if the guide doesn't have any useful info? --Elonka 15:45, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

• I would include in that RfC whether there should be any advocacy at all. If they are intended to influence - and the outcomes suggest that is what they do - then some of the blandishments contained in several of these so-called guides need to be supported by diffs. Without wishing to commit some sort of community wide PA, many voters are like sheep and will follow their favourite guide writer. Leaky Caldron 15:57, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
  • I'm not sure the answer is excluding guides, even if many of them are self-evidently the product of grudges or ax grinding. We should encourage more guides from different points of view instead of from just the usual suspects from the drama boards on- and off- wiki. The community had a lot of differences with the opinions many of the guide writers; I think it would be valuable to hear those voices as well. Gamaliel (talk) 16:08, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
    • This has been discussed over and over and over and the consensus is always the same: the vast majority of Wikipedians want guides to stay. We also agreed that guides containing personal attacks and other unfounded accusations should be handled, by administrators, on a case-by-case basis as if the attack/accusation was made in any other page. No reason to demonize all guides just because some of them are written to attack any given candidate. → Call me Hahc21 17:13, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Just as we don't need to demonise all those who posed questions either, but that also needs examining. Hahc21,you handled the questions particularly well. There was only one question that was borderline permissible and that was from an Arb! The questions were easy, none were really leading, and none were outright PA.

The voters might be able to to sift the crap from the credible, but often they don't or can't, especially if the questioner is well known, straightforward and generally sincere. However, elections, particularly RfA as we all know, bring out the worst in the best people who otherwise have to consciously exercise restraint, and the very worst of mischaracterisation and PA from dedicated detractors and disrupters of collaborative harmony. At Arbcom level, if the community rally wants a better committee, it should stop playing games, act wth responsibility and demonstrate some maturity with their questions and voter guides. I'm sure that there were as many who understood my line of answering as those who lacked the clue to do so. I hope it served its purpose for the future elections. We've got less than a year to get it right. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:55, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Although I agree that both RfA and ACE should be looked into and revised, I believe that ACE works, in the majority of circumstances, as intented. For me, the burden is on administators to take on the duty of patrolling the election pages to make sure the standards of civility prevail, and the lack of it is a problem closely related to how we handle requests for adminship. Now, about my personal experience with the election, I still sort of regret putting myself forward last year, given what happened afterwards. → Call me Hahc21 00:15, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Are number available?

For the purposes of the election, it's been long standard procedure to treat "Neutral" and "no vote" as the same. I would like to see the numbers break down where "No vote" and "neutral" are broken out as separate. Just out of curiosity, I'd like to see why tehre was variance in "neutrality" and whether it was variance in a "neutral" vote or variance in a "no vote." Also, I'd like to see percentage approvals of "neutral" is counted in the percentage equation while "no vote" (i.e. of the votes cast, what is the "approval" - right now it's a percentage of only approval percentage of votes casting "approve" vs. "approve+oppose".

Also, was candidate order randomized for each voter or the same? If order is heuristic, comparing a vote "support, neutral oppose" vs. no vote to the heuristic is also sometimes meaningful. (I'd recommend randomizing the order if that was not done. (Al Gore lost 2000 presidential election because identical butterfly ballots had a built in order bias that can be eliminated with electronic votes like this one. On the other hand, Pat Buchanon received a lot of unexpected votes from that same order bias)

If someone has the data that breaks down "neutral" from no vote cast, I'd like to play with it. --DHeyward (talk) 23:53, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

• Voting "neutral" in this specific Wikipedia election has always been a waste of time, but many new voters (myself included years ago) don't realize this. I'm also pretty sure that the order of candidates presented to individual voters was randomly presented each time a new voter presented themselves. Guy1890 (talk) 00:14, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

• @DHeyward: I'm not sure I understand. If I am recalling correctly, when I voted, all of the radio buttons were automatically filled in to "Neutral", and I then moved them to either the "Support" or "Oppose" positions. I don't recall being able to not cast a vote of support, neutral, or oppose at all. I also believe that yes, candidate order was randomized for each ballot. Mz7 (talk) 02:24, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

DHeyward, yes. The system forces a neutral by default. But that, of course, is the result of a conscious decision by the voter not to support or oppose a candidate. It's ambiguous in terms of voter intention, because we can never tell which of those two outlined above pertains in each instance. Just as oppose is ambiguous under this weird ternary system: does it mean "I'm trying to drag back this one's score so my supports are further advantaged" (very sane voter behaviour), or does it mean "I don't want this candidate to be an arb"—or both. The ternary system nowadays distorts the pure support rates much more than it used to in the early years (2009 onwards, when Securepoll was adopted). Tony (talk) 02:41, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

I believe candidate order on the poll was randomized. There's no data on the randomization available as far as I know, it would provide hours of endless fun if the actual distributions were made known - presumably they are intended to be uniform. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 17:05, 12 December 2015 (UTC).

Observations from a veteran editor, the old and crusty kind

As you can see on my userpage, I've been around this outfit for quite a while now (I'm the 7115th most-active editor at the moment), though I long ago became thoroughly disillusioned with it. Still, it's a harmless way of filling up my free time without gaining weight or spending money, and is sometimes a useful website - and sometimes not. And sometimes utterly infuriating. But I like to think that my edits - mostly minor sentence and format fixes nowadays, with occasional additions of actual facts and references to trustworthy sources - are helpful to somebody, somewhere, but who knows? A 12-year-old prodigy from Buckfum, or his hipster daddy, may come along at any moment and bomb the hell out of anything I do, no matter how carefully or laboriously, so I finally learned the wisdom of of not caring much about whether Wikipedia lives, dies, or stays on an eternal spin cycle. Whatevs, right?

Still, out of some atavistic notion of social utility, I offer here a few observations on this election, for what they are worth to anyone:

1. After nearly ten years of having no clue what ArbCom is, or how people get those jobs, it was really nice to be given an invite to vote. Good idea, guys.

2. I was the 550th editor to cast a vote, a month ago or so - I just now remembered to wonder who won. It would also have been nice to get a message saying "The election results are in - click here to see." Just sayin'.

3. Via this project page, which I found linked from the Signpost article on the election, I found a number of interesting stats on the election, but had to wade through lots and lots of blab, blab, blab to find them. We already have some finely organized templates that give a quick, thorough glance at election stats - e.g., for national elections in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and other countries - perhaps next time around someone could give a thought to improving the delivery of election info.

4. For example, how many editors voted? is a question I had to search for the answer of. And then I wondered, what percent of active wikieditors is that? I realize "active wikieditors" may be a debateable term, but the concept I'm getting at here is on a par with "voter turnout" in real-world elections - again, just a point that might be thought of next time. Also, I remember there were at least two self-identified female candidates who in their statements highlighted the crying need for greater women's participation in ArbCom and across the wikiverse - so now how many women are members of ArbCom? I still haven't found that bit of info. And why did one successful candidate get only a 1-year term? And why did people win who didn't get 50 percent of the vote? And the list of unanswered questions goes on . . . but I'll stop there.

5. Somewhere I seem to recall reading that voting is limited to editors on the English Wikipedia. Yet when I stumbled upon the list of voters, I see more than a few who apparently voted from other language wikis - is that true? Should it be? What about requiring photo ID's? TOEFL? Oh, skip it.

6. Somewhere above on this talk page, I think, I finally came across a crucial statement by somebody that "I have reviewed the balloting and certify the votes cast," or words to that effect. In the real world, there's always an Election Commission or Supervisor of Elections who is responsible for doing that, and to whom complaints of irregularities could be addressed - not that I have any reason to think there were any, but who knows? - again, something that ought not to be so hard for a voter to find.

7. And now my main point - when I was notified of the election, it happened to be on a day and at a time when I had nothing better to do, so just out of curiosity I clicked on through to see what this strange new critter looked like. And then I decided just for the hell of it to read all 21 candidate statements, and for most of them looked at their userpages and in some cases their talkpages to get a better idea of their personalities and experience. That was a lot of work. But I persevered, and made myself a list, marking Support for 12 candidates, Oppose for 3, and Neutral for the rest. Today I was pleased to see that six of my "Supported" candidates were elected, along with 2 "Opposed" and 1 "Neutraled". But again I say - that was a helluva lot of work, which I never do in the real world for any election.

8. Perhaps that last point begs the question of whether or not we all ought to be doing a lot of work before voting in real elections. I won't get into that. But in addition to all that clicking and reading, it was also pretty tedious to click yea, nay, or whatever for 21 different candidates. I have no ideas on how to make the process better, I'm just saying it was all very tedious and tiresome, and really more trouble than it is worth to me in actual fact - since I have never been at all involved in ArbCom, and cannot imagine at this late date any case or cause that would induce me to care enough to want to be involved with ArbCom - our shadowy, unlocatable Supreme Court, I suppose it is. Or would that be Supreme Junta? Or (whispering) is that the new name for the Thing That Must Not Be Named? Whatever. I would in all probability secede from Wikipedia before I ever reached that point of infuriation with someone, so I probably have no business voting, anyway. Does that matter? Should it?

9. I voted just out of curiosity, not because I felt any compelling need, or personal investment in the results. Looking over the candidates' statements and other stuff, I used my gut feelings to support people who A) seemed to be experienced in Highly Serious Wikimatters, or B) seemed fairly rational, logical, and fair-minded, or C) were dispensing free beer. But one more time: it was a lot of work, and if I had had anything better to do at that particular moment, I would have been doing it rather than laboriously combing through a lot of wikipages reading stuff about people I don't know, most of whom I don't even know what they look like or where they live, much less their real names or whether they are in fact alive or cunningly made-up zombies. (Come to think of it, that could apply to some real-world candidates, but I digress.) In other words, while it was a mildly interesting, if reeeeallly slow, type of video game for part of a rainy evening, it's not something I would want to do again. And it's way too hard to find out all the results and the context of the results of the election.

10. So there's my 2 cents' worth. Rightly or wrongly, if you guys want more people to be involved and vote and care, you gotta make it easier and more immediately rewarding to do so - i.e., at a bare minimum, the reward of information about the results and the voting process. Either in this wikiworld or the real one, same goes. Anyone wants to get my vote next year, I suggest you start with a free beer platform for veteran editors. Money would be nice too, just sayin'. Okay, that's all. If you've read this far, you should understand what I mean about "lots of blab, blab, blab." Over and out. Textorus (talk) 15:04, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

It may be that your post causes some people to rethink the whole idea of encouraging more people to vote. Neutron (talk) 23:17, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Textorus, I will try to answer some of your questions. The results were announced at a couple of noticeboards, including Administrators, and the Arbitration Committee Noticeboard. There was also a Watchlist notification, so every logged in user, for a period of time, would have had a notification (not a big red box by any means) at the top of their watchlist. There were three successful candidates who are women (two new, and one reelected), there is also one who is in the middle of a two year term, making four total on the committee. The one year term was to complete the term of an arbitrator that retired in the middle of a two year term. As for being elected but not getting 50% of the vote, that is related to how the votes are tallied. The formula was Support/Support+Oppose (thus neutral votes have no real bearing on the election). So (using simple numbers) if there were a total of 1000 votes, someone with 300 supports and 200 opposes (60%) would rank higher than someone with 500 supports and 500 opposes (50%). As for where the voters voted from, they likely clicked on a link on the wiki that is listed, and if they met the voting criteria on English Wikipedia, were eligible to vote (not sure about this, I am just guessing). Point 6, the certifications, were done by the scrutineers, they are stewards who's home wiki is not English Wikipedia. They reviewed all the votes to ensure that there were no duplicates, and no users using multiple accounts to vote. Point 7, yes there is a lot of material to review, especially for someone who is not overly familiar with the candidates. Point 8, the decisions of the committee can affect a lot of the community (even if you are not party to a case), so I would suggest it is a good idea to vote, even if you don't think that you will ever have your actions brought before the committee. Hope this answers some of your questions. --kelapstick^(bainuu) 19:53, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Kelapstick, thanks for your painstaking reply to my queries. As I said, the difficulty of researching the candidates makes it unlikely that I will vote again - especially since editing here is like writing on the sand at the seashore, which can be obliterated at any moment by the next errant wave, or bratty kid, and is thus not worth investing my energies and emotions in. But just on the general principle that at least a few sensible adults should walk the beach to prevent actual mayhem, I'm glad you got a seat on ArbCom. You were one of my top picks. Good luck, and thanks again for taking the time to reply. Textorus (talk) 22:33, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Textorus, I appreciate your observations and suggestions, particularly, "you gotta make it easier and more immediately rewarding to do so." Positive reinforcement goes a long way to maintaining behavior, and small tokens of appreciation, e.g., Barnstars, are effective reinforcers. (Beer would be nice too, but virtual delivery remains a challenge. ;o) Regarding notification, since the election was announced in a banner at the top of every page, it would be appropriate to announce the election results in the same manner. And award every editor who invests the (significant) time and energy to vote with The Barnstar of Diligence. Mark D Worthen PsyD 07:01, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

Markworthen, those are good suggestions. Thanks for taking the time to respond to my post. Textorus (talk) 13:59, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

Arbitration, Arbiters, Elections, Election Results

Is there anything anywhere which tells one in a concise form about arbitration, what arbitrators do, when the elections are announced and how to stand???? After all, you cannot stand for something when you don't know it even exists, let alone what it does. — Preceding unsigned comment added by T A Francis (talk • contribs) 19:58, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Guide to arbitration is the best overview of what arbitration is and what arbitrators do, and I think Worm That Turned (a former arbitrator) has written something about his experiences somewhere but I can't immediately find where.

The elections are a multi-stage process. In September there is an RFC which determines the format of the election and it's timescale. Assuming that next year's election follows the same format and timescale as this year's (which is likely) then in October the electoral commission will receive nominations and be selected. In mid-November, candidates for the arbitration committee self-nominate - based on the past few years this is likely to be 10 days starting on 6 or 13 November 2016. Finally voting is open for a period of 14 days in late November-early December. Every stage is announced in various places, including Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee and Wikipedia:Administrators' Noticeboard. You can watchlist next year's election page - Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2016 - now (it will show up in your watchlist when it is created), and that will have links to every stage of the process and detail the timeline when it is agreed in the RfC. Thryduulf (talk) 10:46, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Personal Talk pages spammed

Why was my personal talk page spammed with a paragraph about this, which I have to waste time deleting? Vicarage (talk) 23:57, 21 November 2016 (UTC)