This is an archive of past discussions with User:Boing! said Zebedee. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

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October 2013

Help test better mass message delivery

Hi. You're being contacted as you've previously used global message delivery (or its English Wikipedia counterpart). It doesn't feel so great to be spammed, does it? ;-)

For the past few months, Legoktm has built a replacement to the current message delivery system called MassMessage. MassMessage uses a proper user interface form (no more editing a /Spam subpage), works faster (it can complete a large delivery in minutes), and no longer requires being on an access list (any local administrator can use it). In addition, many tiny annoyances with the old system have been addressed. It's a real improvement! :-)

You can test out MassMessage here: testwiki:Special:MassMessage. The biggest difference you'll likely notice is that any input list must use a new {{#target:}} parser function. For example, {{#target:User talk:Jimbo Wales}} or {{#target:User talk:Jimbo Wales|test2.wiki.x.io}}. For detailed instructions, check out mw:Help:Extension:MassMessage.

If you find any bugs, have suggestions for additional features, or have any other feedback, drop a note at m:Talk:MassMessage. Thanks for spamming! --MZMcBride (talk) 05:16, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

November 2013

A kitten for you!

Semi-active is not as active as this kitten, but it's better than semi-retired. See, I like to consider the glass half-full. Always nice to see you in action, Boing!.

Drmies (talk) 16:38, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Oh, just a bit of gnome-work to pay my way for using the site - like I was doing before I got drawn into the circus ;-) -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 18:04, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Encouragement

'tis the season

Did you know ...

... that the song "Ermutigung" by Wolf Biermann, encouraging people not to become hardened in hard times, was written for Peter Huchel, then under house arrest?
that Louisa Venable Kyle wrote a children's book on The Witch of Pungo ;)

Both appeared, Encouragement (not my article, but my hook, inspired by the absurdity under "season", - I'm so proud of that!) and the unwanted witch ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:26, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

:-) -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:45, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Encouragement endorsed. Press ganging is obviously discouraged, and the small sack I have wouldn't fit over your head anyway. But, you know, if I have to travel 12,000 miles "back home" to buy you that beer, it would be awesome to discuss your success in some putative, theoretical, endeavour to make things better at the same time. (I'm talking here, obviously, only about your potential candidacy to replace Mr Capaldi as the 13th, 14th or 42nd Doctor...). If there's anything other than that going on, well, meh, can't be important and has less Daleks. Begoon ^talk 13:53, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, I don't drink these days, but the thoughts are appreciated :-) -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 09:12, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

I like your voters guide! Comparing to my collection, I support almost all that you support, with two exceptions due to personal experience. - Did you know that The Witch of Pungo was quite successful on the German Main page (in the DYK equivalent)? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:20, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks - I've had no real personal interactions with any of them myself. And nice result for the German thing - ~~shame PumpkinSky was treated so badly.~~ Thinking again, I'm going to keep my mouth shut about past drama -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 16:57, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Agree. I have hopes for the next arbcom, because almost all who answered looked better than the one (not seeking reelection) whose flowery prose is still in the final Proposed decision, obviously unquestioned by any of the colleagues. I have no idea what s/he saw. PumpkinSky was treated badly, but never threatened to be banned, and then with such "reasoning". It was close. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:22, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Ah yes. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 18:48, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Potential victim wrote article; I texted hook:

DYK ... that Ben Gunn, imprisoned 32 years for killing a friend when he was 14, earned a Master of Arts degree in peace and reconciliation? (History 2 September 2013) - that was the beginning of encouragement, it appeared when the case turned, but was thought of and prepared before, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:29, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

December 2013

Hey

Hey. Hope you're doing well, Boing. Drmies (talk) 18:59, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Well enough - hope you are too -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:41, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

It's the end of the year. Things are dark and gloomy and my team isn't playing in the championship game today. I'd like to enjoy wikiing off again. Take it easy, Drmies (talk) 16:05, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Voting theory

I don't want to carry on this tangential point further at Jimbo's page, I already wish I had posed my question to you privately, not because it isn't interesting, but because I think it is tangential to the main topic. I accept one of the points you made, in a multi-seat election, some voters who abstain on some candidates in a multi-seat election simply wouldn't turn up at their individual RFAs. And so the "abstain" count in a multi-seat election includes the equivalent of "neutral" voters at an individual RFA *and* some of those who simply didn't turn up. In a multi-seat election if you only want to vote for one candidate, you *have to* abstain on the others and add yourself to the count of voters who didn't support - with individual RFAs, you can simply ignore as many as you like and not register in any of the counts.. However, if I understand the support calculation, which is (S/S+O), I don't believe the "forced" abstains will affect the ratio.

As a thought experiment, imagine that the last three RFA are re-opened and I get a chance to contribute. I support candidate A, oppose candidate B and don't know enough about candidate C to opine. If opened individually, I add a support vote to A, and oppose to B and nothing to C. The percentages change in the obvious way. If I am told I have to weigh in on all three, (sort of like ArbCom voting, but let's ignore for the moment, the tactical issues ), I choose support, oppose and abstain. The third voting percentage support will be unchanged, so in this limited situation, I don't see an impact.

What has the potential for changing things is the tactical consideration. In RfA, all who pass the hurdle become admin. In Arbcom, only the top 9. Conceivably, if I strongly prefer candidate X to candidate Y, I might consider support for X and oppose for Y, to help make sure that X gets in. I guess I;m simply not that devious. I simply assessed each candidate, determined whether I would accept them as a member of ArbCom, and supported those where the answer was yes. Your point is that not everyone votes that way, and there are strategies in a multi-seat election that would cause one to oppose a candidate you would find acceptable. That could depress the support percentages, unless it is countered by a situation where someone might support a candidate they would not like elected. My initial thought was that there is no such situation, but there is. Suppose I am very opposed to candidate Z, and concerned that there is some community support for the candidate. Obviously, I oppose Z, but I might support Y, as the lessor of two evils, in the hope that my vote for Y will push Y ahead of Z. I'm not thrilled with Y, and would prefer that Y not be elected, but in a choice between Y and Z, and I prefer Y. So one strategy depresses the percentage support, the other increases it. I don't find it implausible that there is more of the first than the second, but I do not see the inevitability that you see.

The situation is different if there are 21 candidates and we are given 9 support votes. Then I would expect depressed support relatively to one-off RfA type votes, but that isn't the case.

Anyway, sorry to go on, I am fascinated and interested in voting theory, ever since Ken Arrow gave a lecture to a small group of us at a symposium and I became aware of Arrow's impossibility theorem.--S Philbrick (Talk) 23:54, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Hi, and yes, it is fascinating.

Essentially there are two issues that come up every time. One is the complaint that the percentage quoted (ie S/(S+O)) does not show the actual percentage of support of all those who offer an opinion, because it ignores the abstain votes. And that's what my point about abstaining vs simply ignoring was aimed at - a multi-seat election forces abstain votes and therefore depresses the support in terms of S/(S+O+A).

In your second example, sure, there are individual scenarios where you might support someone you would otherwise oppose if you see them as a "less bad" option and thus boost their support. But the thing is, there are lots of tactical voting approaches and I think your suggested one is less common - I don't think it's common to vote for someone you don't like in order to more strongly oppose someone you like even less. I think by far the most common form of tactical voting (just judging from talking to people about the way they vote, and having talked to people who run elections - it would be good to find some hard stats somewhere) is to only cast the same number of votes as there are seats (or even fewer), choosing your favourite n candidates (and voting against the rest if there is an option to oppose, even if you would support them if there were more seats). I certainly did that in this election - I only supported nine candidates and I opposed others who I would have supported had there been more seats, and that does depress the support percentages.

I think if we imagine a more extreme example it makes it clearer. Suppose we had nine seats and only nine candidates turned up - I think we'd then have something very similar to nine separate RFAs, and with no benefit to tactical voting people would essentially vote on each individual candidate's merits. But now what if we add another thousand candidates to the mix, all vying for the nine seats. Votes will surely be spread more thinly, with a greater proportion of opposes - I find it inconceivable that we would get the same levels of support (vs oppose) for our original nine. You may think tactical voting is devious, but it's a well-known and common phenomenon. With our 1,009 candidate example, lots of people will support their top nine and oppose the rest (or at least oppose a lot of them - and a good few of those "not my favourite" opposes will surely go to our original nine).

The bottom line for me is that because they use two very different voting systems, it doesn't make sense to insist that multi-seat ArbCom elections should require the same support percentage as single-option RFAs - the only thing we can do is tailor the required percentages to what works based on experience, and experience does indeed tell us that ArbCom elections produce lower support percentages than RFA.

And yes, Arrow's impossibility theorem is fascinating - I find it fascinating that it is entirely possible for ranking systems to produce a result that was nobody's first preference. I bet hearing it from the man himself was a great experience! -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:11, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Oh, and as one last thought, I'd prefer ArbCom elections to only allow the same number of votes as there are candidates, not have any Oppose option, and the ones with the most votes win. That would be closer to the way multi-seat elections are held in the real world (and I can't think of any election other than ArbCom in which I've been able to vote to oppose). But people seem to want the ability to actively check an option labeled "oppose", even though not supporting is effectively an oppose - it's when we get the effective ability to offer different levels of "not support" that things get far more complicated in terms of tactical voting etc. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:36, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

I would support that simple system. - Now that we don't have it, I voted for the nine candidates I liked best, opposed the ones I would not want to see in the committee, and went neutral on the (several) others, - knowing that it would have been tactically better to oppose all "others", but I didn't have the heart ;) - I am happy with the outcome (even if not all whom I supported won), eight of the elected received Precious, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:33, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

We get people perpetually complaining about the election every year, but what they seem to completely overlook in their personal campaign against authority is that we actually tend to get decent results. The outcomes do seem, to me at least, to pretty fairly reflect a democratic decision by the community - we tend to get people who are generally popular doing well, and generally unpopular people doing less well. Do the naysayers ever have any workable positive suggestions of their own? No they don't. As usual, we just get the "It's a disgrace, they should make the pass mark much higher" style of complaints that would do nothing but guarantee a failure of the election. If people don't like Wikipedia's method of governance (and I think there are serious flaws in it myself), bitching about the technical format of the election isn't going to help. All just my humble, with lashings of AGF and pillars, of course ;-) -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:08, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Oh, and my strategy was to support my top nine and oppose everyone else - except for two abstentions where the candidates only just missed my support. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:10, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Ok, we are much closer than I originally thought. I agree that an S/(S+O+A) formula will depress support, but I thought I knew that you knew that wasn't what was used, so I was puzzled about the word "inevitable", which I parsed as being slightly stronger than you mean. I thought you were claimed there was some mathematical reason why the support level must be lower, I now think you agree there are some tactics and twill depress, some other tactics that will increase, but your plausible belief is that the depressing type are more common. I can buy that.

In my personal case, I started by determining my position on editors I felt I knew, then moved on to start reviewing the ones I did not know well enough to opine. I registered a vote before finishing, worried that I would not complete my analysis and my worry was well-founded. My final vote reflected some abstain on some candidates I hadn't had time to review. I did have more opposes than supports, but looking at the results, I am not displeased.

One final note on meeting Ken Arrow; this was over 30 years ago, and I confess I barely recognized the name when I met him. Of course, there was no Googling at the time, so it was some time later when it dawned on me that I had met THE Ken Arrow. --S Philbrick (Talk) 12:46, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Ah yes, my use of "inevitable" was careless! -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 13:07, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm glad you brought it up, because it forced me to think through some issues, and I realized that my superficial thought that S/(S+O) would be virtually the same as an RfA type vote was not quite right. However, while I accept that the multi-party aspect is more likely to depress than increase the support percentage (relative to a one-off decision), I don't see the mechanics as the main reason for differing percentages. I fully accept that the support rates for Arbcom are likely to be lower than we think are appropriate for RfA, but I think the main cause is something else. I can easily imagine opposing someone for ArbCom, yet willing to strongly support, if, for example, we had term limits and they were up for a reconfirmation RfA. There were two or three candidates I opposed for Arbcom that I would support for a hypothetical reconfirmation RfA, while I don't think I can imagine supporting someone for ArbCom who I would oppose at RfA.--S Philbrick (Talk) 15:49, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Yep, I'm sure that's another cause - it would take actual investigation and stats to know how much each cause contributes. But I expect we're agreed that we can't just assume the two types of elections should give the same results and mandate the same percentages - I think all we can do is go on experience and use whatever works best. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:07, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you!

Thank you for your RfA Support! Things didn't work out, But I appreciate your support! be well. :) --Sue Rangell ✍ ✉ 20:42, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Hello

File:Mundial SantosFC.JPG	User of the Week
	You have became user of the week Alexandharrison (talk) 22:13, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Cold?

	Best wishes
	for the holidays and 2014 from a warmer place than where you probably are - unless... ;) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:21, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

And same to you - and yep, still here in the cold UK -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:34, 21 December 2013 (UTC)