2014
Arbitration Committee Elections
Status
This is a request for comment about the upcoming December 2014 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election.
Purpose of this request for comment: To provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the December 2014 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.
Background: In last year’s election feedback, one of the concerns raised was that election preparation needed to occur earlier to properly consider changes and implement those supported by consensus. Thus, I’ve started the RfC a month earlier to commence the planning stages.
In the case of proposals that change existing rules, or that seek to establish new ones, lack of consensus for a change will result in the rules from the 2013 RFC remaining in force. Some issues are not covered by the existing rules but will need to be decided one way or another for the operation of the election, in those cases it will be up to the closer to figure out a result, even if there is no clear consensus, as they have had to in the past.
Structure: This RfC is divided into portions, each of which contains a question for the community to discuss. The standard RfC structure will be used, in which any user may make a general statement that other users may endorse if they so agree. An exception is made for the polling methodology, where users are encouraged to voice their support or opposition for the possible methods. The questions will be listed in the table of contents below, along with the users who have made statements.
Per the consensus developed on last year's request for comment, the arbitration committee election timetable is as follows:
The questions have been chosen in part from the comments from Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2013/Feedback. More questions may be added if other concerns arise.
Duration: This RfC is scheduled to last for about 30 days; on or after September 25, it will be closed, and an uninvolved editor(s) will determine the results of the RfC. The results will determine the structure, rules, and procedures for the election.
12:00, 25 September 2014 (UTC) Date stamp necessary for the RFC bot, or the next several sections get transcluded into announcements
Use the following format below; post a new statement at the BOTTOM of the section in which you want to make a statement. Endorse by adding a hash symbol (#) and your signature.
===Statement by [[User:USERNAME|USERNAME]]=== Comment ~~~~ ;Users who endorse this statement: #~~~~
Users should only edit one summary or view, other than to endorse.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Over the past few elections, there have been some comments raised about the voting methodology used for the Arbitration Committee election ( 2010, 2012, 2013). The voting system currently used has not been formally reconsidered since it was set up in 2009. I would like to open it up to the community to see if there is still support to continue using the current system or if an alternative system should be used. Currently SecurePoll supports Support/Neutral/Oppose and Schulze method I (which is designed to produce only one winner), but with enough support it may be possible to coordinate with the Wikimedia Foundation and develop a new method for SecurePoll in time for the election. Listed below are some common methods of voting to discuss. Should anyone want to discuss an alternative, feel free to add it and elaborate on your support.
The voter has the option of expressing support or opposition for each candidate, but may choose to abstain from making a decision on one or more candidates. The candidates are rated on the ratio of supports to supports and opposes.
*I oppose the continued use of "oppose" votes, and the concomitant "ratio" mode of determining winning candidates. "First past the post" for a minor election in the grand scheme of things seems quite adequate.
Collect (
talk) 07:20, 26 August 2014 (UTC) noting the problems with "oppose" votes are endemic with people opposing any candidate whom they do not explicitly vote for - or against every proposal which is not precisely the one they vote for, thus giving such people twice or more the effective voting weight of those who only use positive voting)
Collect (
talk) 12:48, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
In an election with n number of available seats, the voter may vote for up to n candidates, with a limit of one vote per candidate. The candidates with the highest number of votes will be elected.
The voter will have the ability to rank candidates in the order of preference. (first, second, third, etc.) The candidates are awarded points proportional to their ranking on each ballot. The candidates receiving the strongest level of support are elected.
The voter gives a score to the candidates on a scale (e.g. 1-10). The scores are added and averaged. The candidates with the highest average are elected.
The voter is given a vote for each available seat on the committee. The voter may spread these votes across as many or few candidates as they wish. There is no obligation to use all your votes. The candidates with the highest number of votes are elected.
Each voter may 'approve' of (i.e. select) as many or as few candidates as he or she wishes by treating each candidate as a separate question ("Do you approve of this person for the job?"). There is no ranking or complex tabulation, and the system avoids problems such as inadvertant vote-splitting ("spoiler effect") between similar candidates. For n open seats, the winners are the n candidates with the most total approval votes. ( Video explanation of this system)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
As seen from last year's request for comment, there was
a consensus to remove Jimbo from the election commission selection process but it was not implemented because consensus was not determined on how it should be done. I'll get the ball rolling with this proposal. As the election commissioners will have access to IP and user agent data, viable candidates will be limited to administrators users who are over 18 and are willing to identify to the Foundation. Successful commission candidates will be ineligible for this year's arbitration election. I would suggest that we have candidates nominate themselves during a seven day period. They will post a nomination statement (250 words or less) with answers to standard questions (about 3-5 questions, which will need to be determined). The community will have a week to ask questions, evaluate, and place comments for the commission candidates. The top three candidates that receive the most support, as determined by a closing 'crat (or more if the close is not clear), will serve as this year's election commissioners. The proposed timetable will be:
While I don't anticipate the commission selection period to take more than a couple of days, the allotted week will allow some buffer time just in case. The duration between the conclusion of the election commission selection and the start of the arbcom election will hopefully allow enough time for the commissioners to get acquainted with the position and set up the SecurePoll system. Suggestions to this proposed process and/or timeline are highly encouraged.
Although a non-admin is practically guaranteed not to be elected, the wrong precedent is being set by disallowing their candidacy. "Adminship is no big deal" and we shouldn't lose sight of that fact, let alone attribute more to them, as Wikipedians, than what the t-shirt allows. Only if tools were required would such a requirement have merit. First of all, admins do not have access to IPs and user agent data as part of their admin function so there is no valid correlation. On the other hand, non-admins who are account creators do have such access, and have had it for quite some time. I believe Otrs also has non-admins who perform faithfully exposed to this information as well. So again, there is no requirement to be an admin to be trusted with this information. I propose the rules should allow anyone who is over 18, willing to identify, and otherwise eligible to vote, to nominate themselves – keeping the above stipulated timeline intact.
The Arbitration Committee election itself, while obviously necessary given that we have an elected ArbCom, takes up a significant amount of the community's time. If we're going to have a formally selected election commission, which I believe we managed fine without for the first several years of elections, let's be sure that setting up and implementing a process for selecting that body doesn't itself become a time-sink. Cf. infinite regress.
The reason I specified it as an admin only is that I don’t believe it would be allowed under the Foundation policy. It’s my understanding that access to oversight/checkuser information requires a user to undergo an RfA or RfA-like process with similar rigor. This policy was what prohibited non-admins from serving on the audit subcommittee in the 2013 appointment. I’m not certain that the election commission process would match the level of scrutiny of an RfA; however the final call will have to come from Philippe on behalf of the legal team.
Unfortunately the comparison to account creation and OTRS is apples to oranges. When an individual submits a request through the account creation process, they explicitly consent to having their IP shared with our volunteers. OTRS users only have access to the information supplied within the email: email address, header information, and whatever information is volunteered by the sender. There is also a disclaimer on the Foundation website stating there is no guarantee that the information shared through OTRS will remain confidential. (Though almost every agent I know does their best to uphold this principle.) The information that is acquired through the election process is subject to the Foundation’s privacy policy which has a more conservative approach to accessing sensitive data. Mike V • Talk 23:50, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
Guessing what WMF will and will not allow is silly. We should jusk ask [1]. NE Ent 20:10, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
On wikis with an Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) whose members have been elected with the support of at least 25-30 members of the local community, CheckUsers can be appointed by the Arbitrators only.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
In the 2013 feedback section, a handful of users raised concerns that the amount of questions posed to the candidates was excessive. This was time consuming for candidates to craft meaningful responses to the questions. Some questions were also regarded as formulaic and/or unable to elicit insightful information about the candidates. Others raised the issue that the large number of questions made it difficult for users to evaluate all the candidates and might have encouraged some users to depend on candidate guides for advice. Thus, I would like to consider a limit of two questions per candidate per user.
I oppose a "two question limit" quite strongly. Candidates are free to answer such questions as they wish to answer, and that has, as far as I know, been the case for some time. Personally, if a candidate does not have three hours to answer questions, I am unsure they will have the hundreds of hours reasonably needed to be a member of the committee, but your mileage may vary.
All that is needed is a comment before any list of questions stating that candidates are under no affirmative obligation to answer all questions.
I have run in this election twice, and both times it has been clear to me that pretty much nobody reads the candidate replies to the standard/boilerplate/canned/whatever you want to call them questions. There is never any follow up, and indeed many of the questions submitted by users ask almost the same things, as if they are not only not reading the reply but are unaware of the previous questions. Since these questions are seemingly not helpful to the voting public they should simply be eliminated and all questions should come from interested members of the community.
A rigid two-question limit may not be desirable, partly because the answer to one question may suggest a follow-up or two. On the other hand, we don't want a situation where one individual could monopolize the floor on everyone's question page by asking a half-dozen or a dozen idiosyncratic questions, either. Is there an intermediate solution here?
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
There were a number of concerns raised regarding the candidate guides created during the election. While users are welcome to continue creating guides and posting them on their userspace, I feel that we should not include them on the official election template.
Election guides and commentary are intended to assist the voters in any election, not just on this minor election on Wikipedia. In order for them to be of use to the voters, they must be allowed reasonable visibility. Wikipedia would thus ill-serve any electoral process by denying reasonable visibility to such guides. Readers of such guides should be presumed to be interested in their content and commentary, and hiding them in any manner would be akin to saying newspapers should not allow the LWV and other guides for elections to be mentioned in articles.
I don't have a specific proposal, but if I had it my way we would not acknowledge voter guides that are clearly based solely on the candidate's responses to the guide writer's questions and nothing else. I find that practice short sighted and irresponsible behavior from users who present themselves as well-informed providers of guidance. I realize there is no way to stop this practice and that picking and choosing voter guides will lead us down a slippery slope with much drama, but I feel it at least deserves some discussion with the hope that maybe some of the guide writers who do things this way will rethink their process. Beeblebrox ( talk) 21:06, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
It has always seemed to me as deeply unWiki that the subject(s) of voter guides cannot easily rebut what is written about them and thus have no effective right of reply. They can comment on the voter guide's talk page, of course, but that does not have the same prominence as the original statement about them. The solution is simple; have an additional column in each individual guide reserved specifically for the candidate's response. Making this work would be easy: the official template would include only guides with a candidate response column; and omit those that don't.
This comment really made me think, and I'm inclined to be sympathetic to it. But, purely as a formatting matter, I can envision this becoming messy, by turning some guides into walls-of-text when the candidate replies to the guide writer, and the guide writer in turn replies to the candidate. We cannot (should not) forbid the latter, and that can make it metasticize, especially if third parties decide to join in. (Keep in mind that many years there are one or two trollish candidates.) Unless the consensus here mandates otherwise, I think that I'm going to start a variation on this idea in my own guide this year – but a variation in which there is a prominent space for each candidate on the guide page where it will be indicated that there is a response on the guide talk page (with a blue link), prominent enough that readers will see it right away even if they were not otherwise going to look at the guide talk page. That way, anyone foolish enough to read my guide will see right away that there are candidate responses, but the actual response and any ensuing discussion will be in the form of traditional Wikipedia talk. After all, the League of Women Voters does not include candidate rebuttals in their guides, and most newspaper and other news source editorial endorsements allow rebuttals in letters to the editors, or the equivalent, but not in the editorial itself. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 21:22, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
An issue raised in the 2013 feedback is that the current requirements of 150 mainspace edits does not function well with the way SecurePoll generates the eligible voter list. It's suggested that the criteria be changed to 200 total edits. In addition, to ensure that voters are active within the community it was proposed that a voter's 200 most recent edits must have occurred within the last 2 years prior to November 1.
Solutions of problems not shown to be of significance are always doubted by me. Unless a problem has been shown to exist with voters, the change from 150 mainspace edits to 200 total edits is not needed. If someone has shown that editors with 150 mainspace edits are a problem, or that any significant number of editors who had 150 mainspace edits were deterred from voting, please tell me. If anyone can show that significant numbers of editors voted (enough to affect any winners of seats) with fewer than 150 mainspace edits due to deficiencies in the SecurePoll mechanism, kindly tell me. I did not find such in my reading of results, thus I oppose any change here.
One of the purposes of the 150 edit requirement to vote is to prevent sockpuppet votes. Of course, one simple work-around is for a user to abandon their accoutn shortly after the election, create a new one 3 months later, keep a low enough profile, and he has 2 voting accounts. I think we need a required minimum activity in the last 6 months before the election.
The names of the voters in all prior elections were published at the time of the elections (under both the open-voting system and under Securepoll). Have there been any significant number of votes cast in any election by users whose voting qualifications are borderline? Newyorkbrad ( talk) 02:02, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Last year when voting began, the site notice said: "Voting is now open to elect new members of the Arbitration Committee." I believe this notice has the unintentional subliminal message that the election's purpose is to replace the current members with new members, and it disadvantages candidates who are sitting members – seeking another term. I propose we redact "new" from the message, making it say "Voting is now open to elect members of the Arbitration Committee."
While I think John Cline has a good idea, I agree with the IP above that the new wording could that striking the word "new" could be seen as favoring incumbents. Therefore, I propose the following wording: "Voting in the Arbitration Committee election is now underway."
While I think John Cline has a good idea, I propose the following wording: "Voting for 7 seats on the Arbitration Committee is now underway." (Where the appropriate number is used of course.)
It is important to understand that only one tranche (plus or minus) is in contention.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
All previous or alternate accounts of the candidates should be compulsory publicly disclosed to the Community in the interest of transparency and for full scrutiny by the community .(Note the option legitimate accounts which have been declared to the Arbitration Committee before the close of nominations do not need to be publicly disclosed is removed here).
I am opposed to this proposition. Though not common, users have abandoned previous accounts for serious privacy concerns. I feel that this would be a compulsory form of outing, linking users to potentially personally-identifying information. Mike V • Talk 18:02, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
I'm also opposed to this. There's no real benefit to declaring previous accounts like this publicly, especially if those accounts would reveal information that would out the user in question. Further, while election to the committee is voluntary, that's not even remotely a reason to allow everyone to rifle through old accounts like a sock drawer (no pun intended). The ability to edit under a pseudonym is pretty fundamental to the wikipedia community and such a fundamental affordance shouldn't be denied to editors who want to run for arbcom. Also, it's a dispute resolution body for an online encylopedia. Arbcom members are not (as is my understanding) given keys to nuclear weapons. Protonk ( talk) 18:42, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
I'd note that I say this as user who has always edited under the same identity and has nothing whatsoever to hide. In all cases the committee should privately be made aware of any previous or alternate accounts. In almost all cases the broader community should also be informed, but there are exceptions. If we absolutely require this it could discourage otherwise qualified candidates from running. That's a bad thing. Beeblebrox ( talk) 21:12, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
"Should we really be worried about editors who would be willing to disclose such an account to their future peers?"I think so. What would happen if someone had a previous account with a history of POV pushing Holocaust denial. Perhaps they spent a lot of time at ANI, but were only blocked a couple of times for edit warring, and then abandoned their account when they realized that it was not such a good idea to link their user page to their Facebook page. What would arbcom do in that scenario? I'm pretty sure I know how the community would react. Also, this is not about whether a user would be disqualified or not; it's about full disclosure.- Mr X 20:53, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
Not a good idea, for the reasons given by Mike V. Sandstein 08:01, 30 August 2014 (UTC) Oppose per Mike V. NE Ent 20:18, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
Per many others, I oppose requiring disclosure of all past accounts, but I think it may be reasonable to ask that, at least, the existence of past accounts be disclosed. In other words, some candidates may choose to say "I previously edited under (blank) account." whereas others might say "I previously edited under another account, which I've disclosed to the committee, but I will not disclose it publicly due to privacy concerns." -- Tryptofish ( talk) 21:37, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
Sometimes a candidate is unwilling to disclose a prior account for a valid reason. The situation arose last year, and the election commission decided that the candidate should disclose the identity of the prior account to a sitting arbitrator (one not involved in the election, obviously) for verification that there were no problems with the prior account. This was done, the arbitrator (in this instance it was myself) gave the required assurance, and this apparently satisfied the community (the candidate was elected). I don't know how often this situation will arise but I think this solution can serve as a precedent. Newyorkbrad ( talk) 19:05, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The standard question set for candidates had, by last year, become a bit of a hodgepodge. In last year's election RfC, I put forth a streamlined set of questions that I thought could become the basis of a revised, more focused question set. To my surprise, at the last minute someone substituted my draft for the existing list and it wound up being used verbatim for the election. We need to decide whether last year's questions or something else should become the foundation for this year's draft, and then what changes, if any, should be made to the draft. Newyorkbrad ( talk) 14:45, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Considering we've gotten the ball rolling on this RFC nearly a full month sooner than last year's, it may be wise to consider tweaking the schedule. I propose the following:
This extends the nomination and voting periods from the previous 10 days to a full two weeks. It also ends voting sooner, allowing more time for a transition period after the results are announced. The week-long "fallow period" between the end of nominations and the start of voting is maintained. In the future, this could be adopted so the nomination period begins the first Sunday of November, etc.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
About half-way through the voting period, the scrutineers should get a tally of the mid-vote results; they should release this tally after the end of the voting period.
This means that on one hand, the community knows, immediately afte the election is over, which way things seem to be headed; on the other hand, it maintains the anonymity of the votes, since plenty of users will havbe voted before this time and plenty will vote only after; and it prevents the early results from causing tactical voting, since te results will only be released after the vote is cloosed.
Comment - That would be a waste of time, since voters are allowed to change their vote until the end of the voting period, and many voters apparently did last year. Besides, I've never heard of anywhere on Earth in History that ballot boxes were opened half through the voting period to scrutinize their contents. Kraxler ( talk) 13:36, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
2014
Arbitration Committee Elections
Status
This is a request for comment about the upcoming December 2014 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election.
Purpose of this request for comment: To provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the December 2014 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules.
Background: In last year’s election feedback, one of the concerns raised was that election preparation needed to occur earlier to properly consider changes and implement those supported by consensus. Thus, I’ve started the RfC a month earlier to commence the planning stages.
In the case of proposals that change existing rules, or that seek to establish new ones, lack of consensus for a change will result in the rules from the 2013 RFC remaining in force. Some issues are not covered by the existing rules but will need to be decided one way or another for the operation of the election, in those cases it will be up to the closer to figure out a result, even if there is no clear consensus, as they have had to in the past.
Structure: This RfC is divided into portions, each of which contains a question for the community to discuss. The standard RfC structure will be used, in which any user may make a general statement that other users may endorse if they so agree. An exception is made for the polling methodology, where users are encouraged to voice their support or opposition for the possible methods. The questions will be listed in the table of contents below, along with the users who have made statements.
Per the consensus developed on last year's request for comment, the arbitration committee election timetable is as follows:
The questions have been chosen in part from the comments from Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2013/Feedback. More questions may be added if other concerns arise.
Duration: This RfC is scheduled to last for about 30 days; on or after September 25, it will be closed, and an uninvolved editor(s) will determine the results of the RfC. The results will determine the structure, rules, and procedures for the election.
12:00, 25 September 2014 (UTC) Date stamp necessary for the RFC bot, or the next several sections get transcluded into announcements
Use the following format below; post a new statement at the BOTTOM of the section in which you want to make a statement. Endorse by adding a hash symbol (#) and your signature.
===Statement by [[User:USERNAME|USERNAME]]=== Comment ~~~~ ;Users who endorse this statement: #~~~~
Users should only edit one summary or view, other than to endorse.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Over the past few elections, there have been some comments raised about the voting methodology used for the Arbitration Committee election ( 2010, 2012, 2013). The voting system currently used has not been formally reconsidered since it was set up in 2009. I would like to open it up to the community to see if there is still support to continue using the current system or if an alternative system should be used. Currently SecurePoll supports Support/Neutral/Oppose and Schulze method I (which is designed to produce only one winner), but with enough support it may be possible to coordinate with the Wikimedia Foundation and develop a new method for SecurePoll in time for the election. Listed below are some common methods of voting to discuss. Should anyone want to discuss an alternative, feel free to add it and elaborate on your support.
The voter has the option of expressing support or opposition for each candidate, but may choose to abstain from making a decision on one or more candidates. The candidates are rated on the ratio of supports to supports and opposes.
*I oppose the continued use of "oppose" votes, and the concomitant "ratio" mode of determining winning candidates. "First past the post" for a minor election in the grand scheme of things seems quite adequate.
Collect (
talk) 07:20, 26 August 2014 (UTC) noting the problems with "oppose" votes are endemic with people opposing any candidate whom they do not explicitly vote for - or against every proposal which is not precisely the one they vote for, thus giving such people twice or more the effective voting weight of those who only use positive voting)
Collect (
talk) 12:48, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
In an election with n number of available seats, the voter may vote for up to n candidates, with a limit of one vote per candidate. The candidates with the highest number of votes will be elected.
The voter will have the ability to rank candidates in the order of preference. (first, second, third, etc.) The candidates are awarded points proportional to their ranking on each ballot. The candidates receiving the strongest level of support are elected.
The voter gives a score to the candidates on a scale (e.g. 1-10). The scores are added and averaged. The candidates with the highest average are elected.
The voter is given a vote for each available seat on the committee. The voter may spread these votes across as many or few candidates as they wish. There is no obligation to use all your votes. The candidates with the highest number of votes are elected.
Each voter may 'approve' of (i.e. select) as many or as few candidates as he or she wishes by treating each candidate as a separate question ("Do you approve of this person for the job?"). There is no ranking or complex tabulation, and the system avoids problems such as inadvertant vote-splitting ("spoiler effect") between similar candidates. For n open seats, the winners are the n candidates with the most total approval votes. ( Video explanation of this system)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
As seen from last year's request for comment, there was
a consensus to remove Jimbo from the election commission selection process but it was not implemented because consensus was not determined on how it should be done. I'll get the ball rolling with this proposal. As the election commissioners will have access to IP and user agent data, viable candidates will be limited to administrators users who are over 18 and are willing to identify to the Foundation. Successful commission candidates will be ineligible for this year's arbitration election. I would suggest that we have candidates nominate themselves during a seven day period. They will post a nomination statement (250 words or less) with answers to standard questions (about 3-5 questions, which will need to be determined). The community will have a week to ask questions, evaluate, and place comments for the commission candidates. The top three candidates that receive the most support, as determined by a closing 'crat (or more if the close is not clear), will serve as this year's election commissioners. The proposed timetable will be:
While I don't anticipate the commission selection period to take more than a couple of days, the allotted week will allow some buffer time just in case. The duration between the conclusion of the election commission selection and the start of the arbcom election will hopefully allow enough time for the commissioners to get acquainted with the position and set up the SecurePoll system. Suggestions to this proposed process and/or timeline are highly encouraged.
Although a non-admin is practically guaranteed not to be elected, the wrong precedent is being set by disallowing their candidacy. "Adminship is no big deal" and we shouldn't lose sight of that fact, let alone attribute more to them, as Wikipedians, than what the t-shirt allows. Only if tools were required would such a requirement have merit. First of all, admins do not have access to IPs and user agent data as part of their admin function so there is no valid correlation. On the other hand, non-admins who are account creators do have such access, and have had it for quite some time. I believe Otrs also has non-admins who perform faithfully exposed to this information as well. So again, there is no requirement to be an admin to be trusted with this information. I propose the rules should allow anyone who is over 18, willing to identify, and otherwise eligible to vote, to nominate themselves – keeping the above stipulated timeline intact.
The Arbitration Committee election itself, while obviously necessary given that we have an elected ArbCom, takes up a significant amount of the community's time. If we're going to have a formally selected election commission, which I believe we managed fine without for the first several years of elections, let's be sure that setting up and implementing a process for selecting that body doesn't itself become a time-sink. Cf. infinite regress.
The reason I specified it as an admin only is that I don’t believe it would be allowed under the Foundation policy. It’s my understanding that access to oversight/checkuser information requires a user to undergo an RfA or RfA-like process with similar rigor. This policy was what prohibited non-admins from serving on the audit subcommittee in the 2013 appointment. I’m not certain that the election commission process would match the level of scrutiny of an RfA; however the final call will have to come from Philippe on behalf of the legal team.
Unfortunately the comparison to account creation and OTRS is apples to oranges. When an individual submits a request through the account creation process, they explicitly consent to having their IP shared with our volunteers. OTRS users only have access to the information supplied within the email: email address, header information, and whatever information is volunteered by the sender. There is also a disclaimer on the Foundation website stating there is no guarantee that the information shared through OTRS will remain confidential. (Though almost every agent I know does their best to uphold this principle.) The information that is acquired through the election process is subject to the Foundation’s privacy policy which has a more conservative approach to accessing sensitive data. Mike V • Talk 23:50, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
Guessing what WMF will and will not allow is silly. We should jusk ask [1]. NE Ent 20:10, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
On wikis with an Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) whose members have been elected with the support of at least 25-30 members of the local community, CheckUsers can be appointed by the Arbitrators only.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
In the 2013 feedback section, a handful of users raised concerns that the amount of questions posed to the candidates was excessive. This was time consuming for candidates to craft meaningful responses to the questions. Some questions were also regarded as formulaic and/or unable to elicit insightful information about the candidates. Others raised the issue that the large number of questions made it difficult for users to evaluate all the candidates and might have encouraged some users to depend on candidate guides for advice. Thus, I would like to consider a limit of two questions per candidate per user.
I oppose a "two question limit" quite strongly. Candidates are free to answer such questions as they wish to answer, and that has, as far as I know, been the case for some time. Personally, if a candidate does not have three hours to answer questions, I am unsure they will have the hundreds of hours reasonably needed to be a member of the committee, but your mileage may vary.
All that is needed is a comment before any list of questions stating that candidates are under no affirmative obligation to answer all questions.
I have run in this election twice, and both times it has been clear to me that pretty much nobody reads the candidate replies to the standard/boilerplate/canned/whatever you want to call them questions. There is never any follow up, and indeed many of the questions submitted by users ask almost the same things, as if they are not only not reading the reply but are unaware of the previous questions. Since these questions are seemingly not helpful to the voting public they should simply be eliminated and all questions should come from interested members of the community.
A rigid two-question limit may not be desirable, partly because the answer to one question may suggest a follow-up or two. On the other hand, we don't want a situation where one individual could monopolize the floor on everyone's question page by asking a half-dozen or a dozen idiosyncratic questions, either. Is there an intermediate solution here?
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
There were a number of concerns raised regarding the candidate guides created during the election. While users are welcome to continue creating guides and posting them on their userspace, I feel that we should not include them on the official election template.
Election guides and commentary are intended to assist the voters in any election, not just on this minor election on Wikipedia. In order for them to be of use to the voters, they must be allowed reasonable visibility. Wikipedia would thus ill-serve any electoral process by denying reasonable visibility to such guides. Readers of such guides should be presumed to be interested in their content and commentary, and hiding them in any manner would be akin to saying newspapers should not allow the LWV and other guides for elections to be mentioned in articles.
I don't have a specific proposal, but if I had it my way we would not acknowledge voter guides that are clearly based solely on the candidate's responses to the guide writer's questions and nothing else. I find that practice short sighted and irresponsible behavior from users who present themselves as well-informed providers of guidance. I realize there is no way to stop this practice and that picking and choosing voter guides will lead us down a slippery slope with much drama, but I feel it at least deserves some discussion with the hope that maybe some of the guide writers who do things this way will rethink their process. Beeblebrox ( talk) 21:06, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
It has always seemed to me as deeply unWiki that the subject(s) of voter guides cannot easily rebut what is written about them and thus have no effective right of reply. They can comment on the voter guide's talk page, of course, but that does not have the same prominence as the original statement about them. The solution is simple; have an additional column in each individual guide reserved specifically for the candidate's response. Making this work would be easy: the official template would include only guides with a candidate response column; and omit those that don't.
This comment really made me think, and I'm inclined to be sympathetic to it. But, purely as a formatting matter, I can envision this becoming messy, by turning some guides into walls-of-text when the candidate replies to the guide writer, and the guide writer in turn replies to the candidate. We cannot (should not) forbid the latter, and that can make it metasticize, especially if third parties decide to join in. (Keep in mind that many years there are one or two trollish candidates.) Unless the consensus here mandates otherwise, I think that I'm going to start a variation on this idea in my own guide this year – but a variation in which there is a prominent space for each candidate on the guide page where it will be indicated that there is a response on the guide talk page (with a blue link), prominent enough that readers will see it right away even if they were not otherwise going to look at the guide talk page. That way, anyone foolish enough to read my guide will see right away that there are candidate responses, but the actual response and any ensuing discussion will be in the form of traditional Wikipedia talk. After all, the League of Women Voters does not include candidate rebuttals in their guides, and most newspaper and other news source editorial endorsements allow rebuttals in letters to the editors, or the equivalent, but not in the editorial itself. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 21:22, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
An issue raised in the 2013 feedback is that the current requirements of 150 mainspace edits does not function well with the way SecurePoll generates the eligible voter list. It's suggested that the criteria be changed to 200 total edits. In addition, to ensure that voters are active within the community it was proposed that a voter's 200 most recent edits must have occurred within the last 2 years prior to November 1.
Solutions of problems not shown to be of significance are always doubted by me. Unless a problem has been shown to exist with voters, the change from 150 mainspace edits to 200 total edits is not needed. If someone has shown that editors with 150 mainspace edits are a problem, or that any significant number of editors who had 150 mainspace edits were deterred from voting, please tell me. If anyone can show that significant numbers of editors voted (enough to affect any winners of seats) with fewer than 150 mainspace edits due to deficiencies in the SecurePoll mechanism, kindly tell me. I did not find such in my reading of results, thus I oppose any change here.
One of the purposes of the 150 edit requirement to vote is to prevent sockpuppet votes. Of course, one simple work-around is for a user to abandon their accoutn shortly after the election, create a new one 3 months later, keep a low enough profile, and he has 2 voting accounts. I think we need a required minimum activity in the last 6 months before the election.
The names of the voters in all prior elections were published at the time of the elections (under both the open-voting system and under Securepoll). Have there been any significant number of votes cast in any election by users whose voting qualifications are borderline? Newyorkbrad ( talk) 02:02, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Last year when voting began, the site notice said: "Voting is now open to elect new members of the Arbitration Committee." I believe this notice has the unintentional subliminal message that the election's purpose is to replace the current members with new members, and it disadvantages candidates who are sitting members – seeking another term. I propose we redact "new" from the message, making it say "Voting is now open to elect members of the Arbitration Committee."
While I think John Cline has a good idea, I agree with the IP above that the new wording could that striking the word "new" could be seen as favoring incumbents. Therefore, I propose the following wording: "Voting in the Arbitration Committee election is now underway."
While I think John Cline has a good idea, I propose the following wording: "Voting for 7 seats on the Arbitration Committee is now underway." (Where the appropriate number is used of course.)
It is important to understand that only one tranche (plus or minus) is in contention.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
All previous or alternate accounts of the candidates should be compulsory publicly disclosed to the Community in the interest of transparency and for full scrutiny by the community .(Note the option legitimate accounts which have been declared to the Arbitration Committee before the close of nominations do not need to be publicly disclosed is removed here).
I am opposed to this proposition. Though not common, users have abandoned previous accounts for serious privacy concerns. I feel that this would be a compulsory form of outing, linking users to potentially personally-identifying information. Mike V • Talk 18:02, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
I'm also opposed to this. There's no real benefit to declaring previous accounts like this publicly, especially if those accounts would reveal information that would out the user in question. Further, while election to the committee is voluntary, that's not even remotely a reason to allow everyone to rifle through old accounts like a sock drawer (no pun intended). The ability to edit under a pseudonym is pretty fundamental to the wikipedia community and such a fundamental affordance shouldn't be denied to editors who want to run for arbcom. Also, it's a dispute resolution body for an online encylopedia. Arbcom members are not (as is my understanding) given keys to nuclear weapons. Protonk ( talk) 18:42, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
I'd note that I say this as user who has always edited under the same identity and has nothing whatsoever to hide. In all cases the committee should privately be made aware of any previous or alternate accounts. In almost all cases the broader community should also be informed, but there are exceptions. If we absolutely require this it could discourage otherwise qualified candidates from running. That's a bad thing. Beeblebrox ( talk) 21:12, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
"Should we really be worried about editors who would be willing to disclose such an account to their future peers?"I think so. What would happen if someone had a previous account with a history of POV pushing Holocaust denial. Perhaps they spent a lot of time at ANI, but were only blocked a couple of times for edit warring, and then abandoned their account when they realized that it was not such a good idea to link their user page to their Facebook page. What would arbcom do in that scenario? I'm pretty sure I know how the community would react. Also, this is not about whether a user would be disqualified or not; it's about full disclosure.- Mr X 20:53, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
Not a good idea, for the reasons given by Mike V. Sandstein 08:01, 30 August 2014 (UTC) Oppose per Mike V. NE Ent 20:18, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
Per many others, I oppose requiring disclosure of all past accounts, but I think it may be reasonable to ask that, at least, the existence of past accounts be disclosed. In other words, some candidates may choose to say "I previously edited under (blank) account." whereas others might say "I previously edited under another account, which I've disclosed to the committee, but I will not disclose it publicly due to privacy concerns." -- Tryptofish ( talk) 21:37, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
Sometimes a candidate is unwilling to disclose a prior account for a valid reason. The situation arose last year, and the election commission decided that the candidate should disclose the identity of the prior account to a sitting arbitrator (one not involved in the election, obviously) for verification that there were no problems with the prior account. This was done, the arbitrator (in this instance it was myself) gave the required assurance, and this apparently satisfied the community (the candidate was elected). I don't know how often this situation will arise but I think this solution can serve as a precedent. Newyorkbrad ( talk) 19:05, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The standard question set for candidates had, by last year, become a bit of a hodgepodge. In last year's election RfC, I put forth a streamlined set of questions that I thought could become the basis of a revised, more focused question set. To my surprise, at the last minute someone substituted my draft for the existing list and it wound up being used verbatim for the election. We need to decide whether last year's questions or something else should become the foundation for this year's draft, and then what changes, if any, should be made to the draft. Newyorkbrad ( talk) 14:45, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Considering we've gotten the ball rolling on this RFC nearly a full month sooner than last year's, it may be wise to consider tweaking the schedule. I propose the following:
This extends the nomination and voting periods from the previous 10 days to a full two weeks. It also ends voting sooner, allowing more time for a transition period after the results are announced. The week-long "fallow period" between the end of nominations and the start of voting is maintained. In the future, this could be adopted so the nomination period begins the first Sunday of November, etc.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
About half-way through the voting period, the scrutineers should get a tally of the mid-vote results; they should release this tally after the end of the voting period.
This means that on one hand, the community knows, immediately afte the election is over, which way things seem to be headed; on the other hand, it maintains the anonymity of the votes, since plenty of users will havbe voted before this time and plenty will vote only after; and it prevents the early results from causing tactical voting, since te results will only be released after the vote is cloosed.
Comment - That would be a waste of time, since voters are allowed to change their vote until the end of the voting period, and many voters apparently did last year. Besides, I've never heard of anywhere on Earth in History that ballot boxes were opened half through the voting period to scrutinize their contents. Kraxler ( talk) 13:36, 10 September 2014 (UTC)