Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2017

2017 Arbitration Committee Elections

Status

• Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now closed. The results have been posted to Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2017.
• Feedback on the election may be left on the feedback page.

It is currently 15:30 (UTC), Saturday, 26 October 2024 ()

The fifteenth annual election for the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee took place in November and December 2017. This election, by practice on Wikimedia projects, is organized by community volunteers, independent of the Arbitration Committee itself.

Election process

Timeline

1. Self-nomination period (from Sunday 00:00, 12 November until Tuesday 23:59, 21 November, UTC) → interested editors are invited to submit a candidate statement. An editor is eligible to stand as a candidate who:

   (i) has a registered account and has made at least 500 mainspace edits before 1 November 2017,

   (ii) is in good standing and not subject to active blocks or site-bans,

   (iii) meets the Wikimedia Foundation's criteria for access to non-public data, is willing to sign the Foundation's non-public information confidentiality agreement, and

   (iv) has disclosed any previous or alternate accounts in their election statements (legitimate accounts which have been declared to the Arbitration Committee before the close of nominations do not need to be publicly disclosed).

2. Voting period (from Monday 00:00, 27 November until Sunday 23:59, 10 December, UTC) → eligible voters can vote on the candidates, using the SecurePoll system. An editor is eligible to vote who:

   (i) has registered an account before Saturday 00:00, 28 October 2017

   (ii) has made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday 00:00, 1 November 2017 and,

   (iii) is not blocked from the English Wikipedia at the time of their vote.

3. Scrutineering period (immediately following the voting period) → scrutineers, consisting of stewards whose main wikis are not the English Wikipedia, will check the votes (e.g. for duplicate, missing, and ineligible votes), and compile a tally of the results. The instructions for scrutineers are outlined here.

Results

Following the voting period, the scrutineers examined the votes and released a tally of the results. The tally ranks candidates by their performance according to the criteria for success in this election, defined as the number of votes cast in support of the candidate divided by the total number of votes cast both for and against (commonly described as "support over support plus oppose" or "S/(S+O)"). "Neutral" preferences are not counted in this metric. A total of 2109 ballots were cast (including duplicates) and 1991 votes were determined to be valid.

Candidate	Support	Neutral	Oppose	Net	Percentage	Result
KrakatoaKatie	1072	681	238	834	81.83%	Two-year term
Callanecc	820	933	238	582	77.50%	Two-year term
Opabinia regalis	810	900	281	529	74.24%	Two-year term
Worm That Turned	751	924	316	435	70.38%	Two-year term
RickinBaltimore	639	1053	299	340	68.12%	Two-year term
Premeditated Chaos	593	1055	343	250	63.35%	Two-year term
BU Rob13	598	1009	384	214	60.90%	Two-year term
Alex Shih	598	997	396	202	60.16%	Two-year term
Mailer diablo	552	1038	401	151	57.92%
SMcCandlish	663	837	491	172	57.45%
The Rambling Man	593	751	647	−54	47.82%
Sir Joseph	444	876	671	−227	39.82%

Certified by:

1. Shanmugamp7 ^(talk) 11:24, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
2. Matiia (talk) 16:27, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
3. RadiX∞ 00:14, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Vacant seats

For 2017, seven current arbitrators will remain on the committee. The committee will continue to have 15 seats, leaving eight vacant seats with two-year terms (January 1, 2018 – December 31, 2019) to be filled in this election. In the event that any of the seven arbitrators with unexpired terms resign or otherwise leave the committee before the start of voting on 27 November, the seat they vacate will be filled for a one-year term. Seats will be filled based on support percentage, as calculated by ${\frac {\text{support}}{\text{support + oppose}}}$. There will be a neutral option; choosing this option will not affect the support percentage for the candidate, and will be treated as though you did not vote in the election with respect to that candidate. The minimum support percentage is 50%. If there are more vacancies than candidates with at least 50% support, those seats will remain vacant.

Guides

For candidates

Nominations for candidates will open at 00:00 UTC, 12 November and will close at 23:59 UTC, 21 November. During this time, any editor in good standing who meets the criteria stated in the "Timeline" section above may nominate themselves by following the instructions to create a candidate statement on the candidates page. Once a candidate has made their statement, they may proceed to answer individual questions as they wish (see the questions page for details and instructions). Candidates may continue to answer questions until the end of the voting period (23:59 UTC, 10 December).

For voters

See the "Timeline" section above for voter eligibility requirements

Once candidates have nominated themselves, voters are invited to review and discuss them. Voters may ask questions throughout the election.

To facilitate their discussions and judgements, voters are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the candidates. This can be done through reading the candidate statements, the answers to the questions put to each candidate (linked from their candidate statements), and the discussion of each candidate (a centralized collection of which will be made available at the discussion page). In addition, a summary guide to candidates will be made available, and augmented by a set of personal guides by individual voters.

Voting will run for 14 days, from 00:00 UTC, 27 November to 23:59 UTC, 10 December. The process will be conducted using the SecurePoll extension which ensures that individual voters' decisions will not be publicly viewable (although technical information about voters, such as their IP address and user-agents, will be visible to the WMF-identified election administrators and scrutineers).

Voters will be invited to choose one of three options for each candidate: "Support", "Oppose" or "Neutral"; and the number of "Support", "Oppose" or "Neutral" preferences a voter can express is otherwise limited only by the number of candidates. After voters have entered their choices for all of the candidates and submitted their votes, they may revisit and change their decisions, but attempting to do so will require expressing preferences for all candidates from scratch. Because of the risk of server lag, voters are advised to cast their vote at the latest an hour before the close of voting to ensure their vote will be counted.