Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2020

2020 Arbitration Committee Elections

Status as of 06:10 (UTC), Thursday, 18 July 2024 ()

• Thank you for participating in the 2020 Arbitration Committee Elections. The certified results have been posted.
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S Marshall's questioning to Bradv

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2020/Coordination § S Marshall's questioning to Bradv

 – Mz7 (talk) 04:36, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

Late nominations - why do candidates wait?

There is always a bias towards the end of the nomination period for candidates to self nominate, this year more extreme than most. I personally don't think this is healthy for the project, and when I've stood (I'm not currently planning on doing so this year) I've always self-nominated towards the start of the period (last year it was a few days in as I was busy offline). However enough people do wait that they must perceive some benefit from doing so. So I want to understand what this perceived benefit is to see if there is anything can be done to remove it. In an ideal world there should be advantage or disadvantage to nominating at any point during the period available. Thryduulf (talk) 13:22, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

As someone who was once a lastminute nomination myself it seems perfectly rational to me. If I were considering running again, surely it would just be common sense to see who else is running, both from the "is someone better qualified than me going to run" and from the "are there people among the likely winners whom I know I'd have difficulty working with?" perspective. ‑ Iridescent 14:00, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

My thoughts:

• Waiting means that, if closer to the deadline candidates who are more likely to win nominate themselves, they don't have to worry about loosing or withdrawing. If the candidate pool is smaller and they think they have a better chance, they could then go for it. I say this because this process has a feel of RfA, where withdrawing and loosing may be seen as a "negative thing" when going for the process again, even if the withdraw is sensible and good / them not winning is because several other very good candidates were also nominated themselves
• Questions here can be hard to answer so, although this may not be a motivation for anyone, adding their nomination later means that the time for questions is shorter. The less time there is to ask questions probably means fewer questions are asked, so it means less time is spent by the candidate answering questions. I'm not suggesting any one nomination which was close to the deadline is because of this, but it might be a reason for a couple of previous candidates.
• People can be a bit last minute with these kind of things, regardless of motivation or situation. I'm certainly prone to being last minute at times, even for small things. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 18:21, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

I really think that for a lot of people they think they could get elected, but aren't convinced they want to be. ArbCom is not exactly the funnest unpaid job in the world and it can be intimidating, in particular to those who have not filled such a role before. So they wait to see if enough good candidates to fill all open spots show up. If they don't see what looks like a good candidate pool they cave in and nominate themselves. On occasion we've also seen the opposite, where a candidate withdraws because they feel there are enough good people that they aren't needed. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:39, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

Unlike real-world political elections, there isn't any fundraising needs or significant mindshare advantages, so there's not much incentive to submit a nomination early. If we want to give everyone more time to mull over the candidates, then we should extend the period of time between the close of nominations and the election. isaacl (talk) 20:17, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

I think it's just a general phenomenon, probably akin to Schelling points. When there is a benefit to coordinating action, we see people spontaneously coordinate without communication or even explicit reasoning. There's safety in a pack, so it benefits candidates to nominate all together. This spontaneous coordination tends to converge on the most salient options (i.e., a Schelling point) because if an option stands out to me it probably stands out to you. There are two dates that could serve as Schelling points: open of nominations and close of nominations. So if candidates are (consciously or unconsciously) coordinating to nominate in packs, we would expect most nominations to come either at the beginning or end of the nomination period. Since nominating at the start increases the duration that you are under scrutiny, it counters the benefit of a pack nomination, and so open of nominations is probably a worse Schelling point than the end of the nomination period. This predicts a U-shaped distribution of nominations where the early peak is lower than the later peak (so I guess that makes it a J-shaped distribution?). I haven't run any stats, but looking at User:SQL/AceStatsByDay it does seem like there's a rough J-shaped distribution of nominations, with the larger peak towards the final days of nomination. That's not to say the other reasons given are wrong. In fact, the explanations already given are probably the shared lines of reasoning that lead to this pattern in the first place. However I think the game theoretic explanation helps understand why the J-shaped nomination distribution is probably going to happen no matter what we do. — Wug·a·po·des​ 22:14, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

• To build off the great thinking above, what incentive is there to go early? Speaking personally not only is there no incentive to go early I think there are active disincentives to go early. The Election Commission already had to get involved because of questions and that's really all an early nomination nets you: the chance to be asked more questions. Plus, as I like to say "deadlines spur action" so it's not surprising that people group around the deadline. The answer to all this, in my mind, is to either give some incentive for earlier nominations. One idea that was rejected during the ACE RfC this year was the idea of ballot order based on nomination time but some other incentive could maybe get support or to start the question/discussion period after the deadline (as we now do when selecting people for the election commission) and at least remove a disincentive. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:30, 17 November 2020 (UTC)