Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-12-13/Election report

Just after midnight UTC end of Wednesday 8 December, the four independent scrutineers—all Wikimedia stewards based on projects other than the English Wikipedia—posted the results of the 2010 Arbitration Committee Elections. The 12 vacant seats on the committee will be filled by three current arbitrators whose terms are about to end (Newyorkbrad, SirFozzie, and Shell Kinney); two former arbitrators (Casliber and John Vandenberg); and seven new faces (Iridescent; Elen of the Roads; Xeno; David Fuchs; Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry; PhilKnight; and Jclemens). Following precedent, the three candidates with the lowest successful votes are likely to have one-year terms to minimise the theoretical oscillation of vacancies at the next election, with two-year terms for the other nine successful candidates (see the chart of arbitrator terms). Jimbo Wales is expected to formally announce the appointments in the coming days.

Incoming arbitrators
The Signpost welcomes the election of the new arbitrators, and wishes them well in performing a central role in the English Wikipedia. The Signpost thanks the unsuccessful candidates for their contributions to the election, and wishes them well in their future contributions to the project. Seven candidates will be first-time arbitrators, and will help to constitute a Committee of diverse skills and backgrounds:
 * , with us since February 2006 and an administrator since September 2007, is based in the UK. Iridescent has been a significant creator of featured articles, including many on topics of English history and geography—some of them not without a certain quirkiness. Iridescent has recently brought to featured status a series on an English railway line that is a significant contribution to this field on the internet. Iridescent has a strong knowledge of the deletion policies and a track-record of vandal fighting.
 * , from the UK, first edited Wikipedia in May 2008 and stands to become an arbitrator a remarkable two months after her RfA. She has been with Wikipedia since 2008, editing fully since 2009. Elen is an active contributor to Media copyright questions and AN/I, and contributes to AfD, using her close knowledge of policy. She has a keen interest in Egyptology, but lists her most significant article contribution as rescuing an article on industrial mixing technology.
 * , from Canada, has been an administrator since June 2008 and a bureaucrat since June 2010. He is a member of the Bot Approvals Group (BAG), with a strong knowledge of bot policy, bots' capabilities, what makes a good bot task, and the approval process. Xeno has considerable experience at WP:RfA/WT:RfA and the bureaucrats' noticeboard, has assisted in developing two essays (Don't poke the bear and Cowboy adminship), and is an avid watcher of the village pumps. He is a member of WikiProject Video games.
 * , from the US, joined Wikipedia in October 2005 and has been an administrator since May 2007. An active writer and reviewer of featured articles, with a record of featured and good article nominations, he has written a guide to featured-article writing. David is an active member of the Dinosaurs, Good articles, Halo, and Video games WikiProjects. He has used his firm understanding of the deletion criteria to contribute to AfD, and has actively welcomed and adopted new users. David is occasionally active as a member of the Volunteer response team.
 * is a member of the British Royal Naval Reserve. He has been an administrator since November 2007, and on the project since 2004. His work has included a strong presence at OTRS and Administrator intervention against vandalism, as well as the more recent Contribution Team and 2010 London fundraiser. Among his (self-admittedly limited) content contributions has been work on articles on the North Korean navy, world ships and submarines, as well as teaching new contributors to edit via OTRS. He appears to have survived the only oppose comment at his RfA: "Outrageous username – excessive in length, inconvenient, churlish, infantile", and has managed to stay relatively free of drama during his tenure as an administrator.
 * joins ArbCom having served for the past 18 months on the Mediation Committee. Phil has been active in arbitration enforcement and in several projects that aim to resolve conflict around ethnonationalist topics, including the Israel–Palestine Collaboration, the Ireland Collaboration, and the Sri Lanka Reconciliation.
 * , currently a graduate student in the US, has been an administrator since November 2008 and recently joined the OTRS team. He has considerable experience dealing with heated situations at controversial articles. He has provided Third opinions, has been actively involved with the AfD and Deletion review processes, and was active in vandal fighting earlier in his involvement with Wikipedia. He has a strong track-record as a good article reviewer.

In addition to these first-time arbitrators, three arbitrators whose initial terms are about to finish were re-elected:
 * , a lawyer from New York City who has served on the Committee for a three-year term;
 * , a technical engineer from the New England region in the north-east of the US who was first elected last year for a one-year term; and
 * , a web designer from Ohio who was also first elected last year for a one-year term.

And two former arbitrators from Australia were returned to the Committee:
 * , a consultant psychiatrist in Sydney; and
 * , a university research support officer at the University of New England (named after a region that by coincidence shares its name with the US region; it is 60–100 kilometres inland from the east coast of Australia).

Making sense of the stats
This year, 850 voters cast nearly 18,000 individual votes for 21 candidates. The withdrawal of three of these candidates during the voting period could be expected to boost the overall oppose vote; despite this, "support" votes were almost 35% of the total votes, up from just under 28% last year (and about 12% in 2008, when the time and effort required to vote for a candidate manually appears to have been associated with minimal active choice by voters). In 2010, "oppose" votes made up 27.8% of total votes, up 0.4 of a percentage point from last year's 27.4% and significantly up from the (manual) 11.8% two years ago. The neutral proportion of the pie chart above for 2008 represents "no shows" by voters at candidate voting pages, whereas in 2009 and 2010, neutral votes can be presumed to have been a conscious decision not to click on either "support" or "oppose" buttons for a candidate.

On the scatter plot below, each of the 71 candidates from the past three ArbCom elections is shown as a point: red for this year (21 candidates, 850 voters), blue for ACE2009 (22 candidates, 996 voters), and black for ACE2008 (28 candidates, 984 voters). Because the number of candidates and voters varied in each election, the support vote for each candidate is given as a percentage of voters who supported her/him—rather than raw vote numbers—to enable the years to be compared on an even footing (vertical axis). The horizontal axis represents the results of the ranking formula used to elect arbitrators.



The graph shows several dramatic features. Only five candidates of the 71 were supported by 50% or more of the voters (see vertical axis), four of them this year (visually, two of these 2010 votes are almost merged). The support votes of candidates were at much lower levels in 2008 than in the SecurePoll elections in 2009 and 2010. This appears to be indirectly caused by the huge "abstain/neutral" vote related to manual voting, as discussed and shown in the pie charts above; the relative paucity of long-shot candidacies in the more recent elections may also be a factor. Under the formula, supports boost the ranking percentage, opposes suppress it; neutral/abstains boost the "ranking formula" value over the raw percentage of voters who support—the vertical axis—because they dilute the support vote (supports divided by voters) but are excluded from the formula.

Using SecurePoll, voters are more likely to click either the oppose or support buttons than they were to visit a candidate's vote page, scroll, and type in a support or oppose vote. In the two SecurePoll elections, the neutral vote has still boosted the apparent support for candidates, using the ranking formula, although less than for the pre-2009 manual voting elections. To interpret the graph, the following should be considered:
 * the closer a candidate lies to the no-neutrals line, the closer the ranking formula is to the actual percentage of voters who supported the candidate; the closer a candidate lies to the bottom-right corner, the greater this difference;
 * the closer a candidate lies to the top-right corner, the fewer the neutral and oppose votes they received (highly desirable);
 * it is not possible to lie on the other side of the no-neutrals line—it is the line of maximum voting intensity, where every voter chose either a support or an oppose for the candidate.

''The statistics were independently reviewed by User:Jayen466. Information about the arbitrators was drawn from their user pages, RfA and RfB texts, the election pages, and in some cases from personal disclosures.''