[WikiEN-l] AFD 100 days

Sun Sep 18 22:28:56 UTC 2005

Having tired of listening to arguments about what goes
on at AFD but having little data, I decided to engage
in a little experiment to analyze voting patterns at
AFD.  I wrote a computer script to parse over 100 days
of AFD logs and compile a variety of statistics by
looking at the bold faced terms (eg. keep, delete,
merge, etc).

Obviously this is imperfect since AFD is suppose to be
about discussion and consensus building (somehow
despite somehow having 100 noms and 875 votes cast a
day), but it is good enough to reveal some interesting
patterns.  For example, I would not have guessed that
on a forum with 7200 participants over 100 days that
the top 5 would account for 10% of all votes.  Or that
for all articles with 2/3 of the votes cast favoring
deletion, only 6 would also have 10 or more keep
votes.

However, I am not all that surprised that regulars
cast delete votes 76% of the time whereas occasional
participants (the vast majority of all voters) say
delete only 56% of the time.

The full listing of statistics compiled so far can be
seen at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AFD_100_days

Things are still somewhat preliminary as I may yet try
to further improve the parser and the last three days
of my AFD sample have not entirely closed, but I doubt
those things with substantially change the patterns.

Anyway, I hope this provides a better grounding for
some of the endless discussions about what to do with
AFD (and whether or not it has serious problems).

-Dragons flight

PS. I need to get back to real life now, so if there
are questions/requests/complaints, it will probably be
several hours or a day before I get back to respond to them.