Universal Code of Conduct/Coordinating Committee/Election/2024/Evaluation

This is an evaluation page to post your feedback about the policies and processes of the inaugural UCoC Coordinating Committee election in 2024.

Your feedback is very much appreciated. Please post your feedback directly to this page. We welcome speakers of all languages in this discussion. Please comment here in any language you wish; staff or other volunteers will translate your comments to English if possible. Sign with four tildes as usual.

General thoughts

The voting process was annoying and I'm even responsible (with the rest of ElectCom): But the candidate list and the voting list were not in the same order. * This was due to some late changes in a first-time-ever election for this committee, but annoying none the less. --Der-Wir-Ing ("DWI") talk 13:25, 16 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I second Der-Wir-Ing's opinion. The list of candidates in the voting page should not be in random order, instead, it should be in ascending order. Thanks. SCP-2000 15:27, 16 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I would have liked to see fewer candidates of higher quality. Various additional requirements could be made of candidates to achieve this. Future elections will be for half as many seats, which will somewhat resolve the issue of there being too many candidates for me to easily wrap my head around; I look forward to this. Toadspike (talk) 14:31, 16 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If we'd had more people elected I would have wondered if some sort of "petition" process would have helped. But as it stands a majority of the very large field got less than 50% support so I'm not sure too many candidates was our problem (I have written more related thoughts about this here). Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:21, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to thank electcom, it was the first election of this committee and many rules, many details were not very clear and the committee was faced with unexpected questions and problems. I think it was not an easy process for them. Thank you! --Civvì (talk) 17:35, 16 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Civvi's comments. This asked a lot of electcom. I would like to thank the whole committee and in particular @Der-Wir-Ing who went out of their way to provide updates and communication for electcom. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:22, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think the seat allocation needs to be rechecked. No matter what system we use, candidates with lower % should not pip candidates with higher. Ideally that should have been the order of seating (not "regional seats first").
- I also think at least one of wiki limits per seat and regional allocation needs to be revisited. Probably former given the talk page discussions about it being added to the charter out of process. It significantly hurt the process, especially when the two diversities clashed.
The overall election process was slightly bumpy, but that's expected on a first time process. Ideally all of these questions (Especially seat allocation rules and "what seat to sign up for") should be answered before the candidacies close.

Soni (talk) 07:54, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Candidacy process

Requiring 8 mini-essays was way too much. I think it telling that some candidates didn't even try to answer all the questions. Some voters might have held that against those candidates which I guess is fair but also it was a lot to ask of candidates. And then it was a lot to ask of voters to read up to 8 mini-essays for each of more than 30 candidates. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:15, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't understand what the purpose of these essays were. Leaderboard (talk) 04:58, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I just couldn't face reading all of those essays. Also, some looked very much as though they were written by AI. Doug Weller (talk) 07:01, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. Candidate statements had fairly low signal in general. Q&A was more interesting for me, and if candidates spent time writing anything, I would prefer that to be a single brief statement in the candidacy plus Q&A. MarioGom (talk) 13:48, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@MarioGom That would be a lot more informative. I suspect a number of people might have been put off by all the essays. Essays are always promotional. Maybe also some specific questions should be set that they all have to answer. Doug Weller (talk) 15:38, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Those are questions, but I think there should just be one question at all: why do you think you're qualified for the role (as a U4C member). 1233 （T / C） 18:33, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I tried to be an informed voter and read each of those 8 mini-essays. But after reading 3-4 of them, I gave up. It was such a time sink. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 13:19, 5 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Questions to candidates

As a candidate, it is hard to justify having a separate candidate information page but one large questions page. It is best to single out those individual questions, and linked by translusion of relevant sections. It is just simply very hard to navigate the questions page, even for candidates.--1233 （T / C） 11:57, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that having as much information as possible about candidates on a single page is good. So at minimum having the questions for individual candidates transcluded to the same page as their candidate info would be a positive in my mind. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:08, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I had a problem with having to navigate also, I might have read more if it had been simple. Doug Weller (talk) 15:39, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Voter outreach and engagement

I was disappointed that this had fewer voters than the enwiki ArbCom election and so many fewer than had approved the charter. That latter piece suggests to me it wasn't made clear why it was important to vote or else voting was too hard (see my comment about 8 mini-essays above) and so interested people just didn't vote. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:17, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Allow me to offer a slightly contrarian reflection: what if the low voter turnout is due to the fact that the entire Wikipedia project was born and revolves around the writing of an encyclopedia, and that in the long run these control structures end up being perceived as bureaucratic burdens that are out of touch with the core business of the project and therefore poorly regarded by the active Wikipedia community? Bramfab (talk) 14:42, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Voting for a charter for the U4C is, if anything, more bureaucratic compared to an election for real people. Beyond that I would point out that Wikipedias/encyclopedias are not the only projects we have. I think you could make an argument that the enwiki ArbCom (the other number I compared this votes to) has proven it's not out of touch with the core business of the project by dint of history but in the abstract I would say it's just as much of a bureaucratic control structure as the U4C. That said I think your point holds up better for why well over 50% of the votes that were cast were neutral. Barkeep49 (talk) 17:07, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To my experience, in the language edition I did work for a while, the not existance of a set of clear basiscal rules for behaviour are (in some communities?) a major hurdle to cooperate smoothly in the creation of source based and non-biased knowledge. Too many, too sharp wordings and insults are being used, too much intimidation, to bring a (not source based) personal opinion in the spotlights and having a piece of text being published by that person. Rules can be gamechangers and facilitators ... Kevin Bouwens (talk) 19:11, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think these elections could have been advertised much more than they were. At least best I could tell, there were a number of qualified candidates who never nominated themselves. I do not have easy solutions to this problem but greater outreach of some kind would be helpful.
I think the lack of a "voter guides" and "General discussion" section hurt voters. There were too many candidates (somewhat expected) but no way for voters to easily rule out the most unqualified ones. Encouraging the community to create guides (and making sure they're visible without much searching) would allow voters to make quicker decisions on "Someone else I trust has already evaluated these 10 people to be highly unqualified" so they can actually evaluate the viable candidates.
Speaking of the format, I think the SecurePoll hurt voting the biggest. There was no way to "save votes without submitting", no way to "support all/oppose all", and no way to "Sort by alphabetical". At least half of those features would have made voting for 30+ candidates a lot less painful. I don't know how much technical support is needed for each of those.

Soni (talk) 07:53, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The two voter guides were useful but not sufficient for me. And it's a real handicap not being able to save votes without submitting or to sort alphabetically, I had to keep searching once I'd decided on a candidate. Took too long. Doug Weller (talk) 15:42, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Results

I feel that it would be best to have a results section on the main elections page itself (see Talk:Universal Code of Conduct/Coordinating Committee/Election/2024 § Results), as well as the header having a link to results before they are posted so people know where to look (and so that there isn't an immediate need for a translation administrator etc). Sdrqaz (talk) 00:23, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Added for now. RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 00:50, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a bit concerned with the "who you know" part of this election, a trend I've seen in steward elections where strong candidates not in the anti-vandalism track from non-major wikis are unfairly disadvantaged. The 7 people who did win come from four major wikis, and have some degree of "clout" (for the lack of a better word) going for them. I think that would have disadvantaged people like myself who lack the "name recognition" others have, so in other words if I was based on en.wiki instead, I suspect I would have done better. Correct me if I'm wrong. Leaderboard (talk) 05:24, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I am not sure "name recognition" is the right explanation. The top three vote getters all finished within a percentage point of each other and within 20 supports (out of -1300 votes) suggesting a large amount of voting support overlap there because effectively we tied with each other. Beyond that I'm not sure how much name recognition an enwiki admin would have on dewiki or a German arb on itwiki. I do think an argument can be made that the electorate only cared about certain kinds of experience that people from certain wikis were far more likely to have. Though I also note the overlap with people elected and people who had sysop + some other high level permission whether bureaucract, arb, or steward 6 of 7. A person who is from a smaller project could get crat so that's the optimistic take. I think. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 10:30, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"A person who is from a smaller project could get crat" - not really since they would be unlikely to meet MVR. Mine wouldn't for instance. And I get where you're coming from, but I did feel like people like 0xDeadbeef and RXerself did better solely because of their being part of relatively large wikis. The only exception I could see is User:Chinmayee Mishra who did well above average for someone without any sysop rights. Leaderboard (talk) 11:20, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Fair point on the crats - I really meant smaller but you're right that small wouldn't have that option. But I am curious if a CU had run (CU being something that your project does have) if that also would have gotten people enough support. It's a reasonable supposition to say that Deadbeef being an enwiki admin likely helped them get from the 50% range of a few other admins to the 60% range of being selected. I do think it's harder to claim that for RXerself based on the number of idwiki voters. So to tie it back to my original point, I think as best we can tell voters were in general looking for some sign of "highly trusted" in previous experience but this wasn't the only thing they were looking at and a good question to ask if what could be done to reduce the incredibly high number of neutrals every candidate got. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:38, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This discussion shows one of the major disadvantages of SecurePoll: We simply don't know for sure why people opposed certain candidates (or voted neutral instead of supporting) – different to steward elections (or any other onwiki election) where we could just look at the voter's comments... Johannnes89 (talk) 21:06, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Discussions in several places

Hello, I see many open discussions in several places: here and in the Election talk page. I think We should merge them? --Ibrahim.ID ✪ 13:14, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]