Revolutionise the site

Guldbamsen wrote: I am sorry if you feel disillusioned Steve, and I am even more sorry that I wasn't around to make any sort of meaningful contributions to what you were trying to do here. I am in a completely other world at the moment and I have a hard time gathering my thoughts on PA right now, but just so you know, and just so all others know, - you are a wonderfully kind and generous man. I know that with every fibre of my being. Hell, I just need to read your Christmas greeting again. Plus everything you tried to do here, was from a place of goodwill and care - not to stir up the place for the sake of argument. I believe that to be true. All the best my friend, and maybe those pints will taste even better than you think

I am sorry if you feel disillusioned Steve, and I am even more sorry that I wasn't around to make any sort of meaningful contributions to what you were trying to do here. I am in a completely other world at the moment and I have a hard time gathering my thoughts on PA right now, but just so you know, and just so all others know, - you are a wonderfully kind and generous man. I know that with every fibre of my being. Hell, I just need to read your Christmas greeting again. Plus everything you tried to do here, was from a place of goodwill and care - not to stir up the place for the sake of argument. I believe that to be true.

All the best my friend, and maybe those pints will taste even better than you think

Okay. I have had my say, and I initiated this debate. It is clear that this debate has, effectively, ended with the senior collabs and admins in favour of keeping the status quo. Fine, I accept that.

for information wrote: Obviously everyone has it in their heads that a majority-vote means anything over 50% but that only applies when everyone votes. And I mean everyone, not just everyone in a team, but every member and every visitor to the PA. Once we apply that to a team then the concept of a majority becomes more difficult and certainly not 50%   Majority voting for a team has its own inherant problems and limitations and this has to do with the mathematics of sampling. I have tried to explain this before but I do not have the skill to do it succinctly because it is not an easy subject to understand, especially if mathematics is not your 'thing'.   When you have a large population (and we must regard a membership of 50,000 people as a large population here) then the sample size where a majority vote is representative of the whole membership is an equally large number of people. I mean numbers in the order of 1,000 or more (in the following I chosen a value of 100 for illustative purposes to make the maths easier to follow, the actual number would be 1,000s). So if we assume that a team has say 100 people then 51 is a majority that is a good representative of the views of 25,001 people from the population of 50,000 people - therefore if we reduce the team size below 100 then still 51 people must still vote "yes" to represent 25,001 people, if we only have a 90-man team then 46 "yes" votes does not represent the "yes" votes of 25,001 out of 50,000 people, the magic number is still 51 "yes" votes because the total population is still 50,000. [This is the first "hard bit" to comprehend, stick with it until you understand it and then read on].   So once we get to a team of exactly 51 people then all must vote "yes" to be representative of a population of 50,000. If we use a majority vote of a 51 man team then they can only represent a membership of 25,001 people. That's simple majority voting. As long as every man in a 51 man team votes "yes" then a single person outside the 51 man team can disagree with the vote but that only puts them in the 24,999 minority, 51 people can disagree and they are still only part of the minority, as does 24,999 people disagreeing. But if one of the 51 people in the team does not vote "yes" then they have not achieved a majority - the 50 remaining "yes" votes represents less than 25,000 people so the vote fails. Because of that any vote that isn't a "yes" vote has to be counted as a dissenting vote - even abstains, don't cares and "I was asleep/on holiday/PC was dead/could not vote" - every man must vote and they all must vote "yes".   Everyone got that? Because now it gets harder to follow.   We can keep reducing the team size below 51 people and still be representative of the whole population because probability comes into play. If they all vote "yes" then the probability that a larger 100-man team would produce a majority vote is high. Once there is dissent in the voting the probability drops like a stone, and the effect of the dissent has an inverse relationship to the team size (and it is exponential) - the smaller the team then the weight of a single dissenting vote increases exponentially and therefore the probability that the majority vote of that smaller team is representative of the 100-man team reduces exponentially.   So, we can have a team of less than 51 people and they do not all need ot vote "yes" as long as the probability of them represesenting the 25,001 man majority vote of a 50,000 man membership is high. [This is the second "hard bit" to understand].   Now, in most cases here the majority voting of the whole will not be a balanced split - in general we would all agree on most placements - the majorities would tend to be higher than 50.001% (80% or more is not an unreasonable expectation) so we would expect the majority vote in a 100-man team to be high and therefore the probability of an even smaller team disagreeing with the whole 100-man team is going to be small, which means we can have even smaller teams and still be representative.   Also not everyone of the whole 50,000 membership is going to have an interest or opinion on every band in every subgenre so we can exclude them from the population-count for specific subgenres and form those teams with a sample of the membership that is interested in that specific subgenre to ensure they are representative of that smaller population. This changes the probability of a majority vote being reached and thus reduces the requirement for having large team sizes for them to be representative. It means we can have very small teams of knowledgible people and they will still be representative of the whole population. But (and this is a big BUT) now any dissenting vote is even more significant - one non-yes vote carries more effective weight than any "yes" vote because the yes votes are only representative of a smaller selective population.   Ideally, regardless of team-size, we should have unanimous voting, but this is impractical and untenable. Majority voting does not guarantee that the majority of the total membership will agree, but it does mean that the probability that the majority will agree is acceptable.

I don't think you're a bad guy Steve, but I do think you're wrong in your overall assessment.  And yes, even as applies to the specific people you have in mind.  There has been improvement there whether or not you acknowledge it.  And you're right, this isn't the place to have that discussion about individuals.

Cheap shots are in the eye of the beholder.  They give the readership a view of the teams that is objectionable to me, and I have to say that.  You just mentioned 2 or 3 bands, so to use your words that is clearly "isolated examples" when you compare it to the number of bands we added in 2012. 

How many bands did we add in 2012 Steve?  How does that compare to number of reject examples you can cite? 

Angelo, thanks for the long and thoughtful post, it is much appreciated.  When I tried to impart to Steve that his continually pushed view of the teams is unfair and inaccurate, I had missed his phrase "narrow empire" which is nothing more than again, another cheap shot that does not reflect the people I work with every day (on all the teams, not just RPI).   Steve will say he means no offense I'm sure....and yet, as the collective targets for the words I've been protesting, he could makes the same points without the jabs that give the members a skewed view of what kind of people the volunteer collabs are. 

I do not believe however that "sub genre pending" is a good road to go down and I'll tell you why.  Two things could happen....the new decision authority team could stack up bands that the genre teams may find problematic, causing a glut of bands noted "genre pending" which makes us all look silly, see Gerinski's comment below.....or consider the opposite....the new bands team may reject a band that the genre team would have approved.  It is nothing more than another level of potential conflict that sounds good on paper, but doesn't really help the end result.  It kicks the can down the road and the new potential conflict could cause strife that costs us valuable people.

Because remember, though Squackett gets bandied about here like it is an everyday occurrence, it is very rare that such an event happens.  When we start to see lists of prog bands that have been killed by the teams because we have a hard-on for rejecting bands, I might be more open to Sub Genres Pending.  Where exactly are the throngs of people rioting in the streets because the teams are refusing them??.....let there be some evidence that Squackett is the norm before you take the decision away from the genre teams and give it to others.  

Ultimately that is what frustrates me so about Steve's charges.  He puts forth the idea that his scenarios are the norm, and they are not!  The norm is that most bands get in, and lately they get in with increasing efficiency.  The norm is that my fellow collabs on these teams work well together most of the time and we get done what we are asked to get done.  Steve's view of the teams are the rare exception, not the rule.  We really don't need "sub genre pending", we take our responsibility for these decisions quite seriously and try very hard to be inclusive without watering down the site to a ridiculous level. 

I assume the site does want some level of review and checking by the people they've promoted to CZ.....if we're nothing more than a rubber stamp for every suggestion ever made, then yes, there is no point in having us around.  My contention is that the VAST majority of suggestions do get approved in a reasonable manner.  The ones that do cause some debate should be handled with care, and I agree genre teams should act more cooperative when disputes arise. I think we were heading that direction naturally for the most part. 



Edited by Finnforest - January 20 2013 at 09:40

lazland wrote: Look at Yes. They are a symphonic band, yes? Well, okay. But, is 90125? That would fit within Crossover as we define it here.

Edited by Gerinski - January 20 2013 at 05:17

Gerinski wrote: In my opinion a "sub-genre pending" tag would look very unprofessional. "Look at these guys, they call themselves 'the ultimate Prog resource on the net', they have added a band so supposedly they have listened to it enough to identify it as Prog and yet they can not tell what kind of Prog they play, hahaha" The site user does not need to know how the site works internally, that team members are just volunteers, how does the addition process work etc, many casual users will probably assume that the site is run by a professional team who knows what it's doing. There should be a simple democratic process, if the band is tossed between let's say, Symphonic, Crossover and Neo without quick consensus, all the members of these 3 teams vote and the band goes to whichever of the 3 sub-genres has been most voted, without further discussions. As simple as that. For the rest I repeat that I am not in favour of merging sub-genres, the result would be even less accurate tagging than now, I would not like to see Rush tagged as a Prog Metal band

Not a bad idea, man!  Let's remember to suggest this be tried next time we have a difficult placement that everyone agrees belongs.....

The band "holding pen" "sub" has been proposed many times and would seem to alleviate those very rare situations like Squackett.  However the idea has always been pretty soundly rejected in the CZ, if memory serves....though I can't remember the exact concerns they had.

Dayvenkirq wrote: ^ OK, ... maybe you have missed the numerous posts written by a number of people who argued that the "Top 100 Prog Albums" list is nothing but a joke. It's like a funny representation of what's cast in stone. Why would we even need this list? It's just math. We don't need another "Billboard chart" of sorts.