Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2012/Feedback

2012 Arbitration Committee Elections

Status

Thank you for participating in the 2012 Arbitration Committee Election. The results have been verified and published.
Please offer your feedback on the Election process.

Candidates: Candidate guide; Candidate statements; Questions for the candidates; Discuss the candidates

Voter guides
These guides represent the thoughts of their authors. All individually written voter guides are eligible for inclusion. Guides to other guides are ineligible. Reaper Eternal Elonka SandyGeorgia Sven Manguard Hahc21 Hot Stop Ealdgyth Heimstern HJ Mitchell Wizardman Boing! said Zebedee Collect Kurtis Rschen7754 Kiefer.Wolfowitz Casliber

Feedback by role[edit]

Voters[edit]

That was easy. Thanks to the election coordinators for their hard work in ensuring the process runs smoothly. Go Phightins! 00:04, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
On the voting page, this link needs to be changed to its 2012 counterpart. Kilopi (talk) 00:09, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Done Thanks for the heads up. MBisanz ^talk 02:07, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The link for the username for YOLO in the voting ballot that I got was dead. Please rectify it. TheOriginalSoni (talk) 12:54, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'll doublecheck, but I believe that candidate has opted not to have a userpage. MBisanz ^talk 14:00, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that user does not have a userpage, thus there is no way to rectify the link unless they desired to create one. MBisanz ^talk 14:30, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thinking that there should maybe be an interface to switch a single vote. I'm guessing that the reason why old votes are not displayed is due to anonymity (?) or something like that, but it shouldn't compromise anything if one could change one's vote for a single candidate, no? ⁓ Hello 71 15:25, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It would be nice to have a page that lists each candidate's answers to each of the general questions and their candidate statements - for easy comparison of all the candidates on an even field. Van Isaac_{WS Vex}^contribs 10:44, 4 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I found this a little odd actually. On the {{ACE2012}} template, the "Questions for the candidates" link points to a list of the questions, which isn't much use compared to {{ACE2011}} which pointed to something a bit more useful. The problem is that there a lot of questions (even general questions) so a long list like that might be a bit unwieldy Worm^TT(talk) 10:57, 4 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Guys, the process was so smooth. Cheers to all! --Ankit Maity ^Talk _Contribs 13:07, 4 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Uph, that was painful. In future, please stick to a standard set of questions and just include one statement per candidate. It takes way too much effort to wade through all the statements AND the questions. Bleh. That said, I wish the next ArbCom all the strength they need to get through until the next voting period. It's a nasty job, but somebody's got to do it. Jane (talk) 21:04, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Candidates[edit]

This is a minor point, but the formatting of the general questions to candidates, with so many subparts and sub-subparts indented at different levels, is making it a little difficult for readers to quickly distinguish between the questions and the answers, unless the candidate uses special formatting. Newyorkbrad (talk) 02:59, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- I liked the way Worm That Turned did it, it made it pretty easy to tell what his answers were. Legoktm (talk) 17:15, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I can say as a candidate that did not care for the formatting. WTT coding trick does produce a nice result, but candidates shouldn't have to go through all that to differentiate their responses from the questions. Not a huge deal but something to consider next year. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:45, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'd agree with the other candidates, whilst formatting makes things easier and makes sense in this scenario, it would have been better to have a different layout to the questions. Worm^TT(talk) 08:43, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The way I did it in my responses was to just add my signature to all my replies. I think it worked out all right. NW (Talk) 20:31, 6 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think there is a multi-part RfC in the making concerning questions : )

To merely bring up one thing in particular, I rather did not like the usage of # to number questions. That alone made things needlessly complicated. - jc37 22:10, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I tend to agree, and not just because one of the voter guides chastised me for not properly following the format... Beeblebrox (talk) 03:16, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Election volunteers[edit]

We need Jimbo to appoint the Commissioners sooner, we need to file a Bugzilla and notify the WMF sooner, and we need to notify the bot-ops who run the logging bot sooner. Ideally, the Commissioners should be appointed no later than a month before the election starts, the WMF should be notified two business weeks in advance, and the bot ops should be flagged down a week in advance. We can overcome a Jimbo-delay by "deeming" Commissioners appointed if they are the top 3 supported people and Jimbo hasn't appointed them by the given day. MBisanz ^talk 02:30, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback by topic[edit]

Complexity of Template:ACE2012[edit]

A number of editors have expressed concern over the complexity of adding new guides to the guides section of Template:ACE2012. There are a couple things that we could do to make the template syntax less complex, but that would reduce the apparent randomness to guide order. For instance, the guide adding part of the template could be substantially simplified if we are willing to accept a system where the guides are always in the same order with relationship to each other, but where they rotate through the positions in that order. Example ABCD BCDA CDAB DABC, C would always come after B and before D, but would have an equal chance to appear anywhere in the order. Do we want to make that compromise to simplify the syntax required to add a guide for next year? Monty ₈₄₅ 15:00, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

First, a programmer could introduce a variable for the divisor, which would be incremented with every new person. Most of us can change "NumberOfCandidates <- 1" "NumberOfCandidates <- 2".

More simply, the program should just count the number of candidates, each of which should just add his user name. Kiefer.Wolfowitz 01:04, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that would be beyond the scope of what we can do with currently available wikicode wouldn't it? We could add a number of candidates variable, but it would need to be in one of the other templates, you can't define a variable within the template that needs to use it, again as far as I'm aware. I'm not sure if needing to edit two templates for each new guide is an improvement. Monty ₈₄₅ 01:31, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well by next year we'll have Lua (/me crosses his fingers) so it should be relatively easy to do something like this then. Legoktm (talk) 02:25, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If Wikimedia's system is not a universal Turing machine, then to Hell with it! Kiefer.Wolfowitz 14:20, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Voting record[edit]

It would be nice if the software easily permitted a user to keep a record of their votes, perhaps by downloading a pdf of the radio button selections. Not a biggy but a nice to have. --Dweller (talk) 10:24, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, you can always take a screenshot before you hit the "submit" button. ;) Personally, I recorded mine in a .txt document. It would be nice to have it as a feature, but I somehow suspect (please prove me wrong?) that it'd take more time to set up than it's worth. – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 19:17, 1 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the rationale behind this either has something to do with privacy or anonymity. ⁓ Hello 71 15:26, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Why do you need the help of scripts if there are screenshot add-ons in the Internet? See this. --Ankit Maity ^Talk _Contribs 13:10, 4 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Questions and follow-ups[edit]

As I said repeatedly at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2012/Coordination#Follow up questions moved, I extremely disliked the practice of moving followup questions and discussion to the talk page. (Disclosure for the future: I was a candidate). NW (Talk) 20:29, 6 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's extremely difficult to find the individual questions for candidates. I could find the removed questions, after stalking election-coordinator extraordinaire MisBanz, and from there work backwards to the original individual-questions page. Kiefer.Wolfowitz 21:37, 6 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have an idea for next year on how to make it easier, specifically, using templates like Coren and WTT's for both the question and answer (it would set them off with boxes and indents and so forth, that could be triggered to link to a talk page discussion thread if people started a discussion on a particular question on the talk page. Also, while it's more for the RFC, I think a general prohibition to asking questions regarding oneself and regarding the questioner's prior interaction with the candidate would be wise. There seems to be an excessive amount of "X happened to me, would you have done X to me?" and "We fought two years ago and you did all these terrible things to me, what do you think now?" that serve more to campaign against the candidate then discover their views on topics. MBisanz ^talk 01:18, 7 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Your second proposal suggests that the readers are too stupid to observe the context. When has that been a problem? (There was similar fretting at the pre-election RfC, and I asked what people were worried about, me and Worm That Turned? Nobody answered.)

If you would require that administrative blocking-heads identify their past conflicts with editors before spouting off at ANI, then that would be a useful proposal! Kiefer.Wolfowitz 01:29, 7 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hehe, baby steps on ANI. My thought isn't that it's particularly harmful to the candidate, but that it makes the ACE environment more hostile and makes it harder for the voters to actually learn what the candidate thinks because of all the chaff-personal disputes filling the page. MBisanz ^talk 03:06, 7 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The dispersion of community comment over two talkpages for each candidate[edit]

I found it much harder this time than last year to usefully read, and offer, comments and discussion on the candidates! In 2011, there was one talkpage for each candidate discussion, whether the discussions started from questions to the candidate, or from observations on the candidate's record before the election. The 2011 unified talkpage worked like this: technically separate talkpages, take for instance Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2011/Candidates/AGK and Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2011/Candidates/AGK/Questions, were merged by means of a redirect. You may recognize the principle: it's how WP:AN and WP:ANI get to have a joint talkpage. But in the 2012 election, no such redirects were used, and thus we had two discrete talkpages per candidate. I suspect I may not be the only user who posted on one of them and was unaware of the other. :-( With me, it was partly native stupidity, but also partly my unthinking assumption that the helpful 2011 redirect arrangement would be in place this time also. Thus I commented at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2012/Candidates/X/Questions (no need to translate "X" here), and didn't discover the existence of Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2012/Candidates/X until the election was already winding down. And yet these pages are both devoted to discussion of X's suitability for arbship. It's completely artificial to try to draw a distinction between "discussion of candidate X" as against "discussion arising from questions to candidate X and their responses to such questions". In reality, the types of points raised overlap by about 90%. I suppose I don't have to explain why it's unfortunate to spread what is essentially one discussion over two pages?

I strongly suggest that these pairs of overlapping talkpages be again merged in the 2013 election. Bring back the talkpage redirects, please! Bishonen | talk 00:36, 13 December 2012 (UTC).[reply]

We may want to consider reducing the number of candidate subpages as well, which could avoid the talk page issue. Perhaps transclude the candidate statement and also have all the questions on /Candidate/X. The only remaining subpage would be /Candidate/X/Statement, and that should be unlikely to get talk page comments. Monty ₈₄₅ 00:46, 13 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree and this is my fault. I should've made more extensive use of redirects when moving questions because I hadn't set up the layout and didn't realize the implications of it. Hopefully next year the layout will be more complete at an earlier stage. MBisanz ^talk 04:31, 13 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Invalid votes[edit]

We had more than two dozen voters who had their votes struck because they failed the 150 mainspace edits rule. I don't object to the rule, but I don't think we should have a rule that relies on manual enforcement, especially one that relies on newbies understanding the difference between mainspace and other spaces - I certainly hadn't grasped that in my first 150 edits. For next year we should either upgrade the software so that it politely and privately informs those editors when they try to vote that they don't meet the voting threshold, or we should amend the voting criteria to something we can automate. I'm really uncomfortable about a system that allows dozens of people to vote, then discards their votes and publicly names them as casting an invalid vote. Ϣere SpielChequers 22:06, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree this is undesirable and hopefully it can be avoided next year. The problem was that usually a sysadmin generates a list of all eligible voters, which they load into SecurePoll. It takes something like a day to generate the list. Given the delay this year and the possibility of not getting any sysadmin time, the commissioners made the call to go forward with the weaker on-the-fly vetting and then strike ineligible voters, rather then delay the start even more. MBisanz ^talk 22:22, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I guess I didn't realize that; so in other words, an automated eligibility-checking process can be re-implemented for next year? I think that would make things a lot less awkward, including for election coordinators who had to notify people who might not have realized that they were ineligible to vote. (I tried to find some ineligible voters, but someone else was always ahead of me.) So it's good to know that with more advance planning (which is really the collective responsibility of the community, not just those volunteers like MuzeMike, MBisanz, Happy-melon, Tznkai etc. who step forward to help arrange things and then get grief over how and when they did their volunteer work from people who didn't work on the election at all), we can have a more automated system for disqualifying ineligible voters in the future. Neutron (talk) 00:14, 15 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I hope that for next year we can get this fixed, either as MBisanz detailed by loading a list of eligible editors into the software or by calculating it on the fly when someone tries to vote. But if we can't get this fixed I would like to see us move to a simpler qualification based on total edits. Ϣere SpielChequers 02:56, 15 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Negative voting[edit]

As mentioned here, negative votes carry much more weight than positive votes, so mixed positive and negative voting systems are generally considered to be grossly unfair (heavily biased in favor of those who understand that they get far more effective votes by negative voting) and unethical. Surely such a system would not be considered "acceptable" anywhere else but Wikipedia? LittleBen (talk) 14:11, 18 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]