User talk:GT/What is your RfA vote worth?
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Actually, I am inclined to think that one Oppose vote can cancel out a dozen support votes. RFAs tend to be decided through pile-on votes. One carefully thought-out oppose vote can swing an RFA in a way that 5 or 10 support votes can't. Of course it isn't the oppose vote, it's the way it's expressed. For example, unless I know someone very well, I will look carefully at oppose votes to let me know if there's some aspect of their Wikipedia career that I have missed that has shown them to be unsuitable. I rarely look at support votes in the same way. I tend to look at who voted to support the candidate (I feel more comfortable if there's a lot of support from people whose opinions I trust), but one or two people I trust isn't enough to commit myself to vote for a candidate. One oppose vote from someone I trust will always make me stop and think. Guettarda 21:34, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
- Right, and I did address that in the introduction, and as I said I was purely approaching this from a mathematical standpoint. It seemed to me like as far as Werdna's RfA concerned the complaint was that people are voting oppose without good reason without being aware that oppose votes AUTOMATICALLY have a greater effect than support votes, no matter what the reasoning behind them, so I just wanted to investigate that. — GT 22:12, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
- Yeah, I understand. And thanks for doing the analysis - it was interesting. I had noticed that it wasn't really a 1:4 effect, but I would never have guessed it was only a 2:1. Of course, there's a reason that oppose votes are worth more than support votes - the only things that work on simple majorities are things that anyone can undo (like page moves) and DRV, which sends things back to AFD automatically if they do succeed. Something that's as hard to undo as adminship needs a supermajority. It would be nice if it could work like Featured Article requests, where the standard is "no significant opposition", but too many people oppose for reasons that aren't relevant to one's functioning as an admin. Thanks again for the analysis - I'm sure I'll reference it in the future... Guettarda 22:21, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
- Thanks. I just added a table which does show that at the extremes the ratio is a bit higher, for what it's worth. — GT 00:15, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
- Yeah, I understand. And thanks for doing the analysis - it was interesting. I had noticed that it wasn't really a 1:4 effect, but I would never have guessed it was only a 2:1. Of course, there's a reason that oppose votes are worth more than support votes - the only things that work on simple majorities are things that anyone can undo (like page moves) and DRV, which sends things back to AFD automatically if they do succeed. Something that's as hard to undo as adminship needs a supermajority. It would be nice if it could work like Featured Article requests, where the standard is "no significant opposition", but too many people oppose for reasons that aren't relevant to one's functioning as an admin. Thanks again for the analysis - I'm sure I'll reference it in the future... Guettarda 22:21, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
The reason an oppose vote is worth more than a support vote is simply because the %age needed to pass is more than 50%. If we put the %age at exactly 80%, 1 oppose vote is worth 4 support votes. It doesn't matter how much the vote changes the %age by, it matters how much chance it has of changing the end result. If the %age is currently 80% and I oppose, it will take 4 people supporting to allow that person to pass. If I were to support, one person opposing would be more than enough to stop that person passing. --Tango 22:04, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
