User talk:SandyGeorgia/ArbVotes2010/Guides

Pastille rouge etc

I just get a blank symbol for about 30 secs, then the file names - no actual symbols seen. Rather too many for one page? A very useful idea anyway. Johnbod (talk) 15:00, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

hmmm ... not sure how to fix ... it comes through fine for me. I'll see what I can do. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:02, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Oh, it's ok now - not sure why. My m/c is pretty slow. Johnbod (talk) 15:26, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

OK, thanks ... guess transclusions work better than images for some reason! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:28, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Interesting

Thanks for posting this Sandy. It's interesting to see how much I disagreed with everyone else on a couple of candidates—it makes me feel a bit conspicuous! NW (Talk) 18:47, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

If you (or anyone else) has any changes, go ahead and update them here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:39, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

I was thinking about one of these... thanks. However I think it should be rotated 90 degrees, then made sortable, and totted up at the bottom of each row so there's a total for each candidate (and at the end of each row so we can see the average skew of each guide) Mind if I take a shot? I may not, I'm feeling poorly. ++Lar: t/c 23:14, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Lar, I've got a Google Spreadsheet where I've been tracking all the guides and crunching the numbers. Let me know if you'd like access? --Elonka 00:16, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Sure... maybe I can pivot it there and see what I can do. you can mail me the link if you want. I do have a gmail account. Thanks! ++Lar: t/c 00:45, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

I'll have to invite you... Mail me your address (I'm elonka at gmail, or use the link on my userpage), and I'll get you added. Anyone else that's reading this that wants access too, same, just let me know which address to invite! --Elonka 01:45, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Invites sent! --Elonka 05:14, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

I looked and it's great stuff but too much for me to hack around with ... maybe next year. I DID manage to make Sandy's table partly sortable (you can sort on the names of the candidates or on the number of supports the candidate got. There's one small anomaly if you sort in one of the number of supports orders but I don't think it's too big a deal) ++Lar: t/c 19:57, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Funny really

I am surprised that even though my guide is not included I would be fairly happy with the outcome of this amalgamation. Lets say any candidate with more than 50 % of the guides supporting them gets elected that returns the following arbs in this order

1. Iridescent (5 stars on my guide)
2. Newyorkbrad (4 stars on my guide)
3. David Fuchs (2 stars on my guide) I forgot this one
4. Casliber (4 stars on my guide)
5. Giano (1 star on my guide but I do appreciate that he would shake things up a bit and possibly in a very good way)
6. SirFozzie (3 stars on my guide)
7. PhilKnight (3 stars on my guide)
8. Elen of the Roads (2 stars on my guide but was initially 3 stars)

It is amusing to me that my hasty ill considered guide comes out with a result fairly close to the combined wisdom of the "8 most helpful guides." Polargeo (talk) 11:18, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Which shows that I didn't choose "helpful guides" according to a predisposition towards results, but rather whether they provided helpful info to voters and reasoning for supporting or opposing. Yours doesn't. And the lengthy format and pictures don't amuse me either, but then I'm a very busy editor and don't have time for that: YMMV. More importantly, your guide is purely subjective, no objective reasoning given to help voters, just your opinion. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:07, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

I came to my opinion by analysing contributions and generally ignoring questions, I state this in my guide. I analysed those contributions with the view of how would a user with contributions like this fare as an arb based on my own experiecne of arbcom, yes it is my own opinion but then same goes for all other guides. I personally think that is a much better method than "is X an admin", "does X agree with me on BLP?", "how many FAs has X got" etc. there is a lot of very very weak reasoning going on here, including my own guide but I still think analysis of contributions is king. Polargeo (talk) 14:25, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

I forgot David Fuchs. Now that was a really interesting one. When thinking about my guide and general impression/interactions I initially was very positive but then I had a little dig around. One of the things I looked at was his admin contributions. His blocks [1] show that in the last 2 years he has just blocked a small handful of IPs/vandalism only accounts but the one time he tried to stray outside of this simple vandal blocking he blocked both Roux and Malleus with a most silly 1 hour block. If this had been one isolated incident amongst other good intelligent blocks then that would be fine but it was his one attempt to sort out a dispute using his admin tools. I don't really care how many FAs he has if he has little or no decent experience sorting out disputes as an admin and the one example is poor then I think my analysis is sound. These weren't the only contributions of his I looked at but the others did not encourage me as to his actual ability to arbitrate either. So I suppose I am trying to say that for each candidate I genuinely did a sort through of contributions and based my guide on my feeling as to how good an arb each candidate would make based entirely on their track record. Polargeo (talk) 14:58, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

• After some consideration I thought it was worth bringing this issue to Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2010/Candidates/David Fuchs so I have. Polargeo (talk) 12:27, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Where it seems to have not gained much traction. It certainly reinforced my support for DF though if it's any consolation. ++Lar: t/c 03:23, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

I agree with SG's assessment of your guide... cute, but meaningless unless we blindly trust your judgment or care more about your actual answers than the process of arriving at them. Neither of which is true in my case, I don't trust your judgment, and I don't really care about your answers, just your reasoning. I would hope that even if you end up disagreeing with a particular assessment of mine you can see why I got it and you can use it to inform your own assessment. Polargeo, you railed against guides from the get go. It appears you've actually missed the entire point of them. ++Lar: t/c 03:23, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

I think we ultimately have to trust every guide writer's judgement unless they present a numerical way of evaluating candidates and then apply it without prejudice to the candidates and I honestly cannot see a single guide writer who has come anywhere near close to doing that. The initial purpose of my guide was simply to add another guide to the list so that users were less likely to follow a single editor's opinion. I would encourage as many guides as possible to take the power away from established guide writers such as yourself and Sandy Georgia. I honestly made an evaluation of the candidates, albeit entirely based on my own opinion of how the candidate would fare as an arb based on the candidate's own contributions and not primarily on their answers to questions. I think I succeeded quite well in my own goals. I could easily have written a load of criteria and showed exactly how I applied this criteria to my assessment but I rejected the idea of doing this and went for the eye catching low level journalistic style. I think it paid off in getting my guide noticed, next time I might do it a different way but I will still campaign for these guides to not exist, including my own. Polargeo (talk) 14:41, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

handicapping

New table below the first... this handicaps the guides by who advocated for which winning and against which losing candidates. Please check my work. What I did was convert the ticks and crosses into "did you get this one right or wrong" and then totted up some stuff. ++Lar: t/c 04:10, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Interesting - I see you (Lar) were the only tipster to get Zeno "right" and NYB "wrong". Otherwise, with the exception of Giano, you can all take your trilbies into the nearest bar for a few celebratory bourbons, on that score anyway. Johnbod (talk) 04:16, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

What's a "trilbie" ? And I'm partial to Bailey's if someone's buying... ++Lar: t/c 14:56, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Trilby - necessary bookie wear. Johnbod (talk) 15:33, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Well um... weren't we more touts than bookmakers??? "I quite fancied Vandenberg's prospects in fair weather, especially on a short track, but he's not much of a go-er (a dirt track go-er) in the mud" However, last I checked Ladbrokes wasn't letting me take a punt on Giano's chances. That said, anything that lets me loo like Frank Sinatra can't be all bad. ++Lar: t/c 15:49, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

The tables are hard work to decipher

I can't make head or tail of what they mean. Can there be a short lead to the table that is regarded as final (the top or the bottom)? The Signpost Election Report is interested in assessing stats produced by the community for next week's edition. Tony (talk)

The two tables (soon to be three) are different. The first one summarizes who advocated for/against which candidate. The second one summarizes whose advocacy matched/didn't match the results and penalizes neutrals. The third one also summarizes whose advocacy matched/didn't but factors out neutrals. Let me know if that doesn't make sense (this page kinda got edited by a lot of people) ++Lar: t/c 14:53, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Guide assessment

I think with the guide assessment conducted here there is a lot of focus on only the guides which were actually selected by SandyGeorgia. Sandy already had more people looking at her own guide than any other, she should not be the definitive voice on which other guides were useful as well. I encourage general post election guide assessment to take place at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2010/Feedback#Voter guides not here. Polargeo (talk) 14:35, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes that (including only some guides) is a problem. Maybe someone else could take a stab at including ALL guides into these rollup charts. It's just more work. Feel free to add the rest of the columns and rows. ++Lar: t/c 14:53, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

I think we should wait for the invitation from SandyGeorgia to do that on her selected guide page. In fact I don't think this is the venue to post these findings as this page is about Sandy's selected guides. Polargeo (talk) 15:56, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

"If you (or anyone else) has any changes, go ahead and update them here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:39, 29 November 2010 (UTC)" ... If Sandy has an issue I doubt very much she'll be shy about letting me or NCM know!!! Polargeo, I think you like to hear yourself complain. That's a bad habit to pick up. ++Lar: t/c 22:59, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Could be worse. At least I don't like to hear myself gloat :). Polargeo (talk) 09:41, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

I suspect that Lar knows me better than Polargeo :) I haven't caught up yet, but what I'm troubled by lately is how much the children are running all of Wiki now, evidenced by the true child-admin-inspired insanity going on with The Fat Man, and including the arb elections. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:30, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

You do know that Jack Merridew is only twelve years old, right, and that the above is a lot of why I chose this user name? Cheers, Jack Merridew 10:03, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

See my response here; I hope that makes things clear about the analysis on the relevant sample of guides. Ncmvocalist (talk) 16:56, 9 December 2010 (UTC)