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
DF wrote:
For those around here that like statistics, I have updated my automated statistical analysis of AFD,
This is fantastic, thank you. I would like to call everyone's attention to something, though. On your table of the most common AFD closers, there is User:Jni, who closed 117 AFDs. Of each AFD he closed, 100% were deletes, with a 30% estimated threshold for delete votes.
If I'm reading this correctly, that means he only needed 30% of the votes to be delete to decide that there was consensus to delete.
If this table isn't proof that we are in a state of pure admin deletion already, because it is totally up to the closing admin what constitutes "consensus" and what doesn't, I don't know what would be. Not only is whether an article to be deleted or kept more in the hands of the closing admin than it is in the hands of the voters, especially in the case of controversial articles (the most important ones!), but the illusion that AFD constitutes the general will of the community makes the decisions arising from it unassailable.
- Ryan