Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2019/Feedback

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If you are unable to vote
Hello! Please note, the voter eligibility requirements were updated this year. If you are unable to vote, but meet the new requirements, please contact the coordinators with a detailed description of any errors or messages you received. Thank you! — xaosflux  Talk 00:20, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Candidate Order
When going through the list of standing candidates and their statements, the Candidates Guides, and the actual ballot, the order of the candidates is different for each page. It would make voting much easier if they were in the same order on each page. That way, I could read a candidate's statement, view the questions and discussion related to their candidacy, check their other information in the guide, and then place my vote before moving on to the next candidate in a methodical order, without having to search for each candidate. Unless one knows all of the candidates personally, it can be difficult to keep track of each one when reading all of their replies to the many (identical or similar) questions. Many thanks. Reade (talk) 11:23, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
 * This would need to be discussed at the next RFC in order to be changed; it was decided in 2016 to keep the randomized order. It could possibly be changed for 2020, but not 2019. Primefac (talk) 11:30, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

What is this?
Yeah this sounds dumb but hear me out. You asked me to vote in these Arbitration Committee Elections. As usual for these kinds of elections, I want to help, improve things, get involved... But, as usual, in order to vote, I click on stuff and just get confused.

In this case I don't know what the Arbitration Committee is, and there was nothing obvious for me to click on to find out. Maybe I missed it. I eventually got to the voting page, after reading some rather vague and allusive, not very helpful candidate statements. On the voting page, unable to choose in a list of names, I clicked on a "feedback" link, which got me here. Which is another confusing page. It has Feedback in the title so I'm editing it to give you feedback, but there's no instructions, so I'll just hope adding a section like this is the right way to give you my feedback.

In conclusion, I don't have much time to click all over the place to find out what this Arbitration Committee does. I'm interested, but not that interested that I want to go down some rabbit holes of technical Wikipedia stuff. I also don't have much time to try to evaluate what all the candidates stand for and who I think might be good at doing whatever this committee does. So I probably won't vote.

Which may all be fine. Maybe this vote is only intended for insiders. If not, my suggestion for making this easier for dummies (but still Wikipedia contributors) like me to vote would be to give a couple paragraphs that explain what this is all about, as if we didn't know anything about Wikipedia bureaucracy. Which we don't.

--Kai Carver (talk) 13:44, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
 * thank you for the feedback, I'm sorry this process was confusing for you. It is fine to not vote, and if you don't want to look in to the candidates that is probably appropriate.  The message you were sent was from Template:ACEMM which includes links to what this is supposed to be about.  The highest level summary may be that this is a committee of other editors who are empowered to make final decisions on how to deal with behavioral conflicts among other editors.  Most editors will never directly interact with the arbitration process, especially if not editing in controversial topics. If you can think of ways to improve that message for next year, feel free to jot them down at Template talk:ACEMM.
 * From a purely technical/election-administration perspective: The message should have directed you to the voting page, on that page there is only one option, a button to "Go to the voting server". Clicking that should have brought you directly to your ballot where you could choose your votes from a list of names. If you did not get a ballot here, would you please try again and let us know what is happening? —  xaosflux  Talk 14:28, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
 * thanks for your reply. I didn't have too much trouble getting to the voting page. The difficulties were two: 1) knowing what the vote was about and 2) understanding what the candidates stood for. The message I received had no easy ways to answer these questions, so going straight to the voting page was useless to me.
 * Something like your high level summary, "ArbCom is a committee of editors who are empowered to make final decisions on how to deal with behavioral conflicts among other editors", could serve to solve the first difficulty next year.
 * The second difficulty is trickier to solve. I'd recommend asking that candidates give a one-sentence or one-paragraph description of their candidacy. That description should be to-the-point and phrased in a way that is understandable to people unfamiliar with Wikipedia arcana. A tall order, I know, but I think doable to give people a hint of what's going on.
 * This is how most democratic elections work. People are free to do more research if they want. But if you truly want participation outside a narrow circle, you need to make it as easy as possible. The current process for this and other Wikipedia votes is strictly for insiders and people who like to vote randomly.
 * I sadly suspect most people organizing the votes are OK with the fact that the votes are only accessible to a select few. To be honest, I know it's work to improve communications. So I don't expect things to improve, much as I wish they would, because I'd like to accomplish my modest Wikipedia civic duty and be more involved. I regret this state of affairs, but that's life. --Kai Carver (talk) 12:26, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
 * There are already Statements from each candidate which have to be a maximum of 400 words. I'm unclear from your comments whether you were aware of these and found they didn't meet your needs, or whether you have (or had) not seen them? Thryduulf (talk) 12:34, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Yup I've seen them. I'm thick, but not that thick. I just found them pretty useless.
 * PS: In a last effort, I started re-perusing the candidate statements. They seemed sadly both long to read and uninformative to me. Then I ran across this statement by a candidate: "As many of you know, I've served several prior terms on the ArbCom." This "many of you know" is a tell that the candidate is addressing a very very small set of editors, of which I am certainly not a part. I'd be curious to know the ratio between people who are eligible to vote and people who actually vote. I bet it's huge. --Kai Carver (talk) 12:40, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
 * So far this year, ~1442 voters of ~40200 eliblge voters have voted, about 3.5%. — xaosflux  Talk 14:08, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Last year ~2,118 voters voted, if we get the same number this year it would be ~5.2%. — xaosflux  Talk 14:09, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
 * For the past three years there have been approximately 2000 valid votes cast, 1442 have been cast so far this year. I know the size of the electoral roll this year was published but I can't remember where, and I haven't found it for previous years either but you are right that only a small percentage vote. I'm not aware of any research that has been done into why people who are eligible don't vote, but many will be simply not be interested in this aspect of Wikipedia and some others will have left the project (permanently or temporarily). There will though be some people like you who are interested but uneducated.
 * It is certainly true that candidate statements are written for those who know what Arbcom is and does, and I'm not certain that it should be any other way. However writing something for those who are unfamiliar with the details of what is happening is an interesting thought. As nearly all candidates will be people who are very familiar with the goings on this isn't necessarily going to be easy though. Certainly for me it would be useful to hear from you (and others in your position) what parts of the statements you do and do not find useful, and what isn't there that you would like there to be. Thryduulf (talk) 14:20, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks
I am very glad because I am able to vote. For me the process is very simple and I really appreciate this.🙌🙌🙌👍👍👍 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Manakpreet_Singh (talk • contribs) 2019-11-23T17:56:24 (UTC)

Help! (AltoStev)
After kinda reading their statements, it seems like 1021% of all of these candidates make me feel like they have contributed to Wikipedia in (either an extremely (helpful and/or astonishing) or an (interesting, creative, and helpful)), way that I could've never done.

''How do you evaluate several candidates? / What is the best way to decide your vote?'' Do I just select 'Approve' for all of them? (originally I would think no, but continuing to think makes me think otherwise) Tangents: Wow, maybe I could just ask candidates question en masse... what an amazing idea / Someone should make an essay/guide on how to vote.

I realize the [now italic] question was pretty much already asked by Kaicarver, so pay more attention to the bold one.  AltoStev Talk 00:20, 29 November 2019 (UTC)
 * without going in to the realm of "strategic voting" - if you think every candidate would be suitable for the committee, voting "approve" for each one is fine. Marking "Neutral" for a candidate is the same as not voting for that candidate at all. Ultimately the candidates with the highest percentage of "support" will be elected, and there are more candidates then there are openings.  Does that help? —  xaosflux  Talk 00:37, 29 November 2019 (UTC)


 * I guess it does (maybe). Thanks! (I have a urge to say more, but oh well.)  AltoStev  Talk 00:44, 29 November 2019 (UTC)
 * sorry if it wasn't complete - I can't really help you decide who to personally vote for, but there are a range of candidate guides that others have written up that you may want to review. If you scroll to the top of this page and click "show" next to "Voter guides" you can see the personal opinions of the candidates from the point of view of other editors. Thank you for leaving feedback though, we take this seriously and look for ways to improve the election next year based on feedback. Best regards, — xaosflux  Talk 00:51, 29 November 2019 (UTC)