Umbran said:
I'm not sure that raw growth is all that meaningful a metric, though. If, for example, the userbase has grown by 50% in the past year, then while the number of votes may have gone up, the percentage of users who vote would have been decreasing.
In my view, both measurements are useful. Voter turnout is a very tricky thing to calculate; it is conditioned by community standards of eligibility and one's own perceptions of membership in a community. For instance, some critics of declining Canadian voter participation suggest that our decision to report voter turnout as a function of
registered rather than
eligible voters obscures our truly low participation rates. Similarly, some suggest that some residents' decision to maintain landed immigrant rather than citizen status over a long period is another concealed indication of voter apathy. Others, however, suggest that our current method of calculating turnout measures a more relevant variable.
The problem is that here on ENWorld, there are no real equivalents to any of the categories that are normally empoyed in discussions of voter turnout in real world elections. We are left to wonder how people perceive their status as participants or lurkers here and whether the obstacle to them voting is unawareness of the vote, disinterest in the vote, unwillingness to educate themselves about the candidates running or lacking a sense of entitlement to participate. All of these are likely factors but it is unclear which are more important.
I think that what we cannot lose, however, is that the increased number of votes is good. All you are raising here, Umbran, is whether it is
good enough.
Now, here's the big (and completely speculative) question - how many voters would we have had if there was no major discussion of the election going on? If we just left it with a poll and the nominations thread, what would the voting look like? Knowing that would give us a handle on how much "pushing" needs to be done to get people to go out and vote?
That would certainly be helpful. But I think there are other ways of pushing this that might also be effective and not so closely linked to the forums. I think, for instance, that turnout is lower amongst those who use the site primarily to read reviews than those who use it mainly as a discussion forum. Similarly, if we have negligible voter eligibility criteria, we might think about how we could do more to promote voting for the judges on non-ENWorld sites or to encourage judge candidates to mobilize more voters in their area through gaming groups, gamers' associations, Gamedays and stores.
