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Revision as of 10:30, 14 December 2011

2011 Arbitration Committee Elections

• WP:ACE2011

Status

• Thank you for participating in the 2011 Arbitration Committee Election. The results have been verified and published.
• Please offer your feedback on the Election process.

v t e 2011 Arbitration Committee Elections Voter log Contact the coordinators Discuss the elections Give your feedback Candidates Candidate guide Candidate statements Questions for the candidates Discuss the candidates Voter guides These guides represent only the views of their authors. All guides written responsibly, seriously and in good faith are welcome for inclusion. Kiefer.Wolfowitz RegentsPark Guerillero Carcharoth Heimstern Master&Expert Rschen7754 Badger Drink William M. Connolley Wizardman Joe Gazz84 NuclearWarfare Monty845 Elonka HJ Mitchell Sven Manguard SandyGeorgia Ealdgyth

An archive of older discussions can be found at /Archive 1.

Examine the ACE voter log!

Or, "wabbit season is now open"

In addition to the real time vote log via the securepoll interface, we have a bot populated voter log right here, which has the username of every user who has voted. We need help inspecting the log for any irregularities such as: someone voting on multiple accounts, a banned user voting on any account, victim of an account or browser hijacking registering a vote that the account owner didn't intend. Take a look at 2009's voter log for examples of what we're looking for. Thank you for all the help!

--Tznkai (talk) 21:50, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Voter numbers and election publicity

Is anyone keeping track of whether the number of votes cast at this stage of the elections is more or less than at the same (or similar) stage last year or the year before (those were both SecurePoll elections, I think)? I'm asking because I made a comment here that indirectly asks that question. Also, is there a list of where and when notices have been left about this election? Such a 'publicity list' should be made each time, as trying to reconstruct such a list from digging through page histories is difficult. Carcharoth (talk) 14:13, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

With four days to go in a 14 day voting period, there have been 578 votes cast in this year's election.

With four days remaining in the 10-day voting period of 2010, there were 574 votes cast; final turnout 854.

With four days to go in the 14 day voting period in 2009, there were 770 votes cast; final turnout 994.

Imprecise comparisons, but perhaps useful.

See the coordinators' talkpage for discussions of notices; no publicity list has yet been compiled to my knowledge. Skomorokh 14:23, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the stats. Looking through the contributions of the co-ordinators should enable some list to be made at some point for this year. It was when I considered comparing that to where and when and how often there was publicity in previous years, that I realised this is only possible if a similar list of notices and their details was made in previous years. If the numbers end up being lower this year, that downward trend might be something to raise on the feedback page. What I was wondering is whether the previous elections had any last-minute publicity push to make sure no-one who would have wanted to vote was unaware of the elections, and whether that is happening this year or not? I have a vague memory of "last few days left to vote" notices being left last year, but might be mis-remembering that. Carcharoth (talk) 14:47, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

In 2010, 321 people had voted after 47 hours. I don't know how this compares to his year though. The figure comes from Misplaced Pages talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2010/Archive 3#Encouraging others to vote. That thread also has complains about lack of publicity. Thryduulf (talk) 17:22, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

In the end raw votes cast were 734 in contrast to 854 in 2010. That's 120 less and amounts to a 14 % decline, the same as between 2009 and 2010. --Tikiwont (talk) 21:26, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Well, that pretty much rules out the voting period length as a major cause of declining participation. Jclemens (talk) 21:48, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Would there be any privacy or other issues in comparing the voter logs for the past 2 years to make a list of those who voted in 2010 but not this year and determining which of them are still active and asking them for their reasons for not voting this year? Thryduulf (talk) 23:49, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Curiosity caused me to scrape the data from Special:SecurePoll and manually extract the unique voters, with these results:

Johnuniq (talk) 07:44, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Releasing results?

When will the preliminary results be released?

Last year, it seems that 2 of the 3 scrutineers had already certified results by now .... Should we stay up or reward our public with beauty sleep?

 Kiefer.Wolfowitz 00:24, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

The tally of the votes will be released once the scrutineers are satisfied everything is above board; that will take up to a week. Judging by previous years, no amount of comments, questions, requests for updates and so forth is likely to have any impact whatsoever on that timeline, so for all (both?) you election junkies out there, ample beauty sleep and/or article writing is encouraged. Skomorokh 00:33, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Skomorokh!

Last year, voting ended on the 5th, which made it easier to post results on the 10th or 11th.

Cheers,  Kiefer.Wolfowitz 00:38, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

You're most welcome. If you want to suggest an earlier scheduling (or any other changes for future elections), now is the perfect time to kick off a discussion on the feedback page. Skomorokh 00:46, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, the scrutineers know that they can take as long as they judge necessary to ensure the election is honest and proper. This might be a day or it might be five: we just don't tell, and nor should we be able to. Tony (talk) 09:12, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks to the candidates

I forgot to vote. So I thought I would try to make up for it by thanking all the candidates. --FormerIP (talk) 00:44, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

ACE2011 denied banner advertising on the basis of a local interpretation of the legitimacy of the RfC?

Risker has raised an interesting point of which I was quite unaware:

"This year's RFC was considered to be so poorly participated in that the people who control the MediaWiki interface felt quite justified in refusing to allow a site banner advising of the election, for example; when those site-wide banners ran to all users, even for a few days, there was considerably more participation."

I believe it's of great concern that a group of people in another place made their own interpretation of the level of participation in the RfC before ACE2011, and dismissed the legitimacy of the RfC. Does this mean that they used their privileged position, exclusive of the community, to make an important decision to the disadvantage of the electoral process? Is the denial of site-wide banner advertising part of the reason the voter numbers are down this year? It seems extraordinary that the community was given one set of RfC closures by trusted admins in a very public place where we could all see the outcomes, yet behind the scenes other people used their power to negatively affect the community's awareness of a critical event for en.WP.

I'd be very pleased to be informed that I'm wrong. Tony (talk) 09:47, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

It's well known that I'm not a fan of our overlords, who are neither all knowing nor particularly benevolent. The problem is that they still are pretty all powerful, and we're pretty stuck with them. Unless everyone decides to leave at the same time and start a new, WMF free fork, we're going to have to live with them. It's not a major problem now, but every time the WMF decides to overrule the community, more and more people lose faith in the WMF. I lost faith in them a long time ago, I wonder how many more stupid mistakes they're going to make before more people become as bitter as I am. Sven Manguard Wha? 10:56, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

This has absolutely nothing to do with off-wiki machinations or the WMF; it was a decision made in public by local administrators. The relevant discussion is here. Skomorokh 13:35, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Apologies. It would appear that I was pegging this particular violation on the wrong behind the scenes group. (My contempt for the WMF is not diminished though). Sven Manguard Wha? 14:39, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

As Skomorokh said, it was not "behind the scenes", but an open discussion held in public. All the above really seems to demonstrate is that if someone (you) are (self-admittedly) bitter about something, you will jump to the wrong conclusions. Though in mitigation, the wording "the people who control the MediaWiki interface" can be interpreted several ways. You seem to have assumed that refers to the WMF, when that part of the interface is actually something that can be modified by any admin (I think). Though people are rightly wary of making changes to a notice that is displayed to all users. Wheel-warring over that would likely and ironically have led to some sort of arbitration request. It is a rather esoteric location anyway. Look at the page history and try and work out how to make changes there. Compare it to the page history at the watchlist notice. Technical stuff like this tends to, by its nature, discourage random admins from doing stuff like this, similar to how only a few people know how to edit and use spam blacklists and whitelists. Trouble is, that can lead to only a few people actually doing anything in a particular area and effectively becoming both a single point of (potential) failure (similar to when a widely used bot goes down without a replacement) and a fiefdom. Carcharoth (talk) 03:28, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

I've started discussions in order to attract more eyes to the Sitenotice issue during the election: here, here, here, and here, but only a few people decided to participate in those discussions. There should've been more people complaining during the election rather than waiting until the election ended. The other problem is that the !voters who has their !votes overturned at MediaWiki_talk:Sitenotice#ACE2011_Edit_Request weren't aware of the discussion. I didn't know about it, and judging from Sven Manguard's apology above, he or she might have not known about that discussion as well. There was a serious lack in communication. A note should've been added to the RfC or its talk page. --Michaeldsuarez (talk) 20:54, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

I wasn't aware of it, and I'm an election coordinator. Tony (talk) 00:28, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

This issue was raised in several places including on the co-ordinators' page here. And I raised it indirectly here (by the link to my comment at the sitenotice talk page). At least one of the co-ordinators replied to me there, so I assumed all of them knew of this. How could you have not been aware of this? This is definitely one of the things that needs to be codified, though this time a note can perhaps be left at that talk page so that those watching that page can then argue against it if they wish to do so. Carcharoth (talk) 03:10, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

• Misplaced Pages Arbitration Committee Elections 2011