I just voted. Though I didn't received or even see the talkpage invitation that was resolved to be sent at this RfC. I hope the message will still be sent to people who haven't voted and particularly less active ones who may otherwise not be aware of the ongoing poll. Wider participation is very important in this process and will ensure Arbs are elected based on wider trust not because less people turn out. –Ammarpad (talk) 13:34, 27 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Ammarpad: The coordinators are currently in the process of getting this pushed out. Mz7 (talk) 01:49, 29 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

OK, –Ammarpad (talk) 13:59, 29 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This was resolved yesterday. — xaosflux ^Talk 04:02, 4 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Why were the invitations (notifications) to vote sent out over a week after the elections began? Was this just a failure (invitations should have actually been sent out a week before the scheduled election, shouldn't they?) or was this intentional to achieve a lower voter turnout? Shouldn't the invitation process be automated - especially on Wikipedia? Why is it done selectively? Stevenmitchell (talk) 05:30, 4 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Stevenmitchell: This process was not "selective", it was very much automated – the notifications were sent by User:MediaWiki message delivery, which is not a human, to a list of all eligible voters who have made at least one edit in the last 12 months. The list is publicly viewable here: Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2017/Coordination/MMS.

To provide some background, there was a consensus at this year's election RfC to limit the notification to editors who have made at least one edit in the last 12 months (so that notifications aren't being spammed to inactive editors who will never read them). However, the technical process of taking the list of eligible voters and reducing it to those who have made an edit in the last 12 months proved to be challenging, and it took a week after the election started before an efficient algorithm was finally designed.

You're right that this was suboptimal, and in the future, the process for getting the notification ready should be started earlier. However, if you read the discussion, I don't think anyone acted maliciously here. In fact, if you look at the voter log, we actually had a higher turnout than last year: whereas 1,993 voters voted this year, only 1,950 voters voted last year. Mz7 (talk) 01:10, 11 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In the future, could the format be changed to a ranked voting system? For example, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE LordOfPens (talk) 16:34, 5 December 2017 (UTC) =Comment: That's a good ideas but there's needs to be a easier way to research users as there are a lot and it hard to make a good decision without enough information. --BrandonALF (talk) 22:24, 7 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The next time around, have a link to the candidates bio on the candidate page to make the process easier. --BrandonALF (talk) 22:24, 7 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]