[WikiEN-l] AFD 100 Days, take 2

Sun Oct 2 05:50:19 UTC 2005

For those around here that like statistics, I have
updated my automated statistical analysis of AFD,

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

to include some information on outcomes.

For the cliffnotes version:

100 Days of AFD, June 1 - September 8
11211 AFDs, 75% deleted
86773 votes, 7202 voters
170 individuals closing at least 1 AFDs

The empirically determined threshold for dividing
delete and keep outcomes is 63.5% favoring deletion. 
This does not account for any vote discounting that
may have occurred.  If one assumes that most socks are
there to vote keep, then this is probably consistent
with the two-thirds majority that most people talk
about as beign required for AFD consensus.

This threshold (63.5%) is enough to predict the
outcome of 94% of AFDs.  Suggesting that only about 6%
of AFDs are subject to any significant degree of vote
interpretation from admins.

Inspection of the closing patterns for the most active
admins suggest that none are substantially different
than this, with the exception of Tony Sidaway who
already admits having stronger deletion requirements
than most, i.e.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tony_Sidaway/Deletion/Closing

Curiously there are some admins that like to mostly
close as delete or mostly close as keep, but they
don't seem to be stretching expectations in order to
do so.

I also noted a number of AFDs (about 2%) that
statistically speaking seemed to stretch credibility. 
Keep results for AFDs with no apparent keep votes,
Delete results for AFDs with 80% keep votes, etc. 
However after inspecting a few of these, I've yet to
find one that really looked like an abuse.  Some seem
to be sockpuppet fests (i.e. 23 votes, 5 from
established accounts).  Some are cases of my parser
failing to count votes because they are written as
essays or otherwise expressed in strange ways.  And at
least one is the result of temporarily brain-dead
admin writing "delete" on a vote he decided to close
as "keep".  There are still many many more I haven't
looked at, but I am optimistic that most AFDs are
being closed in a reasonably consistent manner.

Anyway, just a little more fuel for the endless
debate.  ;-)

-DF