Disclaimer: This page expresses my personal opinions and observations only. I encourage all voters to do their own research on the candidates. There are also other guides written by informed and thoughtful Wikipedians. I encourage you to read those as well before deciding how to vote.

Overview edit

For those who aren't sure what this is about: The Arbitration Committee is part of the Wikipedia dispute resolution process. In fact, ArbCom is pretty much the last stop. For a general real world analogy, ArbCom is sort of like the Supreme Court of Wikipedia. The arbitrators don't make decisions on article content, but they do issue rulings on complex disputes relating to user conduct, and they have considerable authority within the wiki-culture. Members of the committee are usually elected for two-year terms (sometimes one), with a new batch elected each year.

Voting is now closed. Results can be seen here, as they were posted on December 7, 2010.

For anyone interested in my thoughts on the candidates, you can check page history here.

To see my thoughts on previous batches, check the history of:


Comparison between guide data and actual results edit

After the voting was completed and this year's election results were in, I went ahead and compiled a chart that rated all the supports and opposes from the 20-odd legitimate guides (I omitted the ones that were obvious satire), and calculated the support/oppose percentages based on that data. Then when the actual voting results from the 850 voters came out, I compared it against the guide predictions. For anyone interested, here is the data. The top 5 candidates were the same between guides and votes, just in a different order. There were some dramatic differences with other candidates though, especially Xeno and John Vandenberg, who did much better in votes than guides; and GiacomoReturned (Giano) and Georgewilliamherbert, who did worse in votes than in guides. Iridescent also did much better in guides than in votes, but still was in the top 5 in both sets of data.

Candidate % based
on guide data
Order based
on guide data
Percentage based
on actual voting
Order based
on actual voting
% diff Order diff
Newyorkbrad

91.67%

2 89.01% 1 -2.66% 1
Casliber

80.95%

4 78.73% 2 -2.22% 2
SirFozzie

86.36%

3 78.45% 3 -7.91% 0
Iridescent

95.00%

1 74.04% 4 -20.96% -3
Elen

70.00%

5 72.57% 5 2.57% 0
Xeno

42.86%

12 70.64% 6 27.78% 6
David Fuchs

68.42%

6 62.88% 7 -5.54% -1
Chase

55.56%

8 60.61% 8 5.05% 0
PhilKnight

63.16%

7 60.38% 9 -2.78% -2
John Vandenberg

35.00%

17 57.73% 10 22.73% 7
Jclemens

43.75%

11 56.71% 11 12.96% 0
Shell Kinney

40.00%

13 56.70% 12 16.70% 1
Sandstein

39.13%

14 51.30% 13 12.17% 1
Stephen Bain

27.78%

18 45.54% 14 17.76% 4
Harej

38.89%

15 44.62% 15 5.73% 0
Georgewilliamherbert 46.67% 9 44.26% 16 -2.41% -7
FT2

36.36%

16 42.13% 17 5.77% -1
GiacomoReturned

45.00%

10 40.77% 18 -4.23% -8
Balloonman

20.00%

19 38.64% 19 18.64% 0
Off2riorob

0.00%

21 16.87% 20 16.87% 1
Loosmark

0.00%

20 9.87% 21 9.87% -1

For more comparison data, or to offer feedback, see Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2010/Feedback#Voter guides.