User talk:Alzarian16/RfA participation by year

Decline in total !votes/month

Please could you add a column or chart illustrating the decline in RFA !voting? Total RFA !votes in each month is clearly on a downward trend, but it would be nice to see how smooth that was, and how closely it is linked to the number of RFAs running at a time. ϢereSpielChequers 13:51, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Working on it. It might have to exclude early closures at first, as I haven't got the data on them easily accessible and it'll take some time to add it in. Alzarian16 (talk) 15:41, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Early closures are mostly snows which rarely get a dozen !votes, but other ones that close early include a high proportion of the contentious RFAs and the ones where I believe the thresholds for RFA evolve. ϢereSpielChequers 16:13, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Got a graph up for total !votes now, and two columns showing changes by year. The polynomial approximation for this is rather interesting: an x⁵ function fitted the data better, but predicted negative values for RfA participation from 2012 onwards, which is nonsense, so I chose the x⁴ function as the nearest match to always give positive values. Still no progress on early closes. Give it a month, maybe... Alzarian16 (talk) 20:53, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that, I'm not surprised it is hard to model, I'm pretty sure there are a bunch of factors that have affected !voting. Signpost articles are among the obvious ones.... My suspicion is that there are a number of types of RFA participants, and trigger events that prompt their involvement. To understand RFA and predict future participation levels you need to understand and quantify those groups. A few examples:

1. There have been a number of signpost articles on RFA and for the last few months a regular article listing currently live RFAs. We know that the biggest spike in RFA activity in the last 18 months was directly caused by a signpost article.
2. Obviously the number of RFAs directly affects the number of RFA !votes per month. But also the spacing of RFAs probably alters the turnout, I suspect that a month where half a dozen RFAs passed in a couple of clusters and for much of the month no-one ran would get fewer RFA !voters than a month with the same number of RFAs, but where there were always one or two RFAs live. But running at the same time as a contentious, close or high profile RFA probably also boosts an RFA turnout as people who've come to oppose an old foe will then support an well qualified candidate who happens to be running at the same time.
3. IRC discussions and Email canvassing almost certainly have an effect. Someone turned up in a recent RFA and admitted they'd been canvassed to be there. There are other occasions where I've seen !voting patterns that lead me to suspect that particular candidates have been canvassed against.
4. Diversity of activity helps. If you happen to have edited in several different areas there will be more !voters coming to !vote on a familiar candidate. ϢereSpielChequers 08:45, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

RFA thresholds

The difficult thing about analysing past failed RFAs is that some criteria have shifted over time, in particular there has been substantial inflation as to both the minimum number of edits required and also the minimum tenure. I would be really interested to see this modelled perhaps in terms of a multi colour scattergram with date of RFA as one axis, number of edits as another axis, length of tenure as a size of scatter point and different colours for snow fail, marginal fail, narrow pass, clear pass etc. ϢereSpielChequers 13:51, 30 March 2011 (UTC)