The Signpost

Election report

The community has spoken

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

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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:

In addition to these first-time arbitrators, three arbitrators whose initial terms are about to finish were re-elected:

And two former arbitrators from Australia were returned to the Committee:

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 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.


















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-12-13/Election_report