[Foundation-l] Pending Changes development update: September 27

Tue Sep 28 22:44:36 UTC 2010

On 28 September 2010 18:35, Ryan Lomonaco <wiki.ral315 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 6:12 PM, Risker <risker.wp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > And even with it just being put forward as a second trial, the support
> for
> > continuing dropped 10% in two weeks.
> >
> > You're losing the hearts and minds battle here, guys.
> >
> > Risker/Anne
> >
>
> I haven't followed the discussion at all, but I have two statistical
> quibbles:  First, characterizing a drop from 65 to 59% as a "10% drop" is
> misleading - while (65-59)/65 is 10%, it's really a 6% drop.
>

That's 10% of the support that's disappeared in two weeks.

>
> Second, A drop from 65% to 59% is not very statistically significant.  It
> could very easily be explained if more of the people who voted against the
> first time came back for the second vote.  But even if both polls are a
> representative sample of the English Wikipedia as a whole, both polls will
> have a margin of error of a few percent.
>

Any "voting" type process on the English Wikipedia that
garners participation from 500 users in a week is about as statistically
significant as anything you're ever going to get.

Risker/Anne