User:WereSpielChequers/Crat closing of RFAs

This is a page where I intend to set out some of my thoughts as to which arguments at RFA merit greater or lesser weight. It has a talkpage, and people are welcome to comment there. If I have used an argument in a crat chat or elsewhere that doesn't seem to be reflected here, feel free to add it in references to where i have argued that and dated to month and year - my intention is to cover any such comments either with a why I still hold that view or why I no longer do.

Weak v Strong
RFA !voters sometimes preface their !votes as either strong or weak, I am happy to give less weight to those who identify their votes as weak - and have done so myself on occasion. I don't see a need to give extra weight to a vote marked as Strong. I see that as an indicator to give when you give new evidence to the RFA that you believe that others will be swayed by. If it persuades other !voters it could change the course of the RFA and shift the consensus that I or others will look at in closing. So I regard the word "strong" as communication among !voters, rather than communication between !voters and crats.

Trends
Occasionally in RFAs something new emerges late in the RFA and the support takes a nosedive (in theory the opposite could, and at some point might, have happened). An RFA that was heading for near unanimous success starts dropping in support by as much as percent an hour, there is a case for extending such RFAs, but also one can read a consensus. If an RFA has dropped from 96% to 82% support in the last 14 hours since new evidence came to light, with few if any reaffirming support and supporters switching in droves to oppose, simply closing as a success would in my view be wrong. A bold crat move would be to close as a fail, even above the discretionary zone. A more cautious crat move would be to hold a crat chat, watching the talkpage to see if it was dominated by people regretting that they'd not had a chance to strike their support since it closed, or conversely noting that the checkuser had now unblocked the RFA candidate and apologised for misreading the C/U info.