The Signpost

News and notes

Online harassment consultation; High voter turnout at ArbCom elections

2015 voter edit count distribution vs. 2014 and 2013

This year's Arbitration Committee elections are seeing substantially higher voter turnout than in previous years, a reflection of the use of mass messaging to notify volunteers eligible to vote. SecurePoll's voters' list shows 2,778 votes cast at the time of this writing (including some repeat votes from users who changed their votes). Last year's ArbCom elections, by comparison, attracted just 593 valid votes.

The population of voters taking part also appears to shape up very differently from past years. According to an analysis by Opabinia regalis, herself a candidate in the election, the percentage of voters with relatively few contributions (150–5,000 edits) is markedly higher this year. However, early fears that the mass messaging would attract large numbers of voters who had not edited the English Wikipedia in years and were consequently out of touch with the project seem to have been disconfirmed. According to a post by Opabinia regalis on 1 December 2015, based on data available at the time, only 162 voters would have been filtered out by a "must have edited Wikipedia in the last three months before the election" eligibility criterion.

The elections are scheduled to close at 23:59 (UTC) on Sunday, December 6, 2015.


















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