Revolutionise the site

lazland wrote: Dean wrote: Having a few artists in "the wrong category" doesn't do any harm, it just reflects the diversity of opinion on the various styles of music that we regard as being Progressive Rock, few artists adopt one single style of music and stick to it throughout their musical career. Even a band like Status Quo, who many regard as a one-trick pony, ventured beyond 12-bar blues and so it is with most (if not all) Prog bands.   The aim should be the best fit, not the exact fit and often close enough is good enough. And that is a perfectly reasonable, sensible, and pragmatic statement, and I would not argue with a single word. Following on from this, then, is it not the case that teams should be a little bit more open to variations from their strict interpretation of the various styles, and also react positively to positive and open suggestions and criticisms when there are disagreements about additions? I would rather this than being shouted at and told to mind my own bloody business, as has happened on more than a few occasions. As I said in the other thread, the sub-genres form an important resource of the site as a whole, not individual empires.

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.

lazland wrote: This, btw, also, IMO, supports my view that artists should be added to the site where we agree it/they are prog, and argue about the semantics of styles afterwards.

It doesn't, and I have gone into that at great length in other threads.