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When should a judgement be removed?

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Blackflag
By Blackflag | Jan 11 2015 12:24 PM
It seems like admin is dead-set against removing bad judgements, as long as there was not any intentional trolling intent. Is there any line we draw. To my knowledge the only time admin has had to really remove judgements on here were when RM was around, and one on the Stalingrad debate (was that RM). I understand where this mindset comes from though, but maybe admin can elaborate more?

Anyways, the way we handle judgements on Edeb8 is extremely different from what I remember on DDO. I am pretty sure there airmax would remove a judgement on every other debate, and would, to my amazement, engage in a lengthy speculation process on every single judgement to make sure it wasn't nonsense. Whereas again, admin allows nonsense votes, as long as they weren't intentionally nonsensical. This says something about edeb8 culture, and where we are different from DDO. I know this site is more about improvement, having fun, and helping others. Why do we not fully live up to that image?

There is no reason why we should have silly competitive nonsense like elo. Everything implemented on this site seemed to strengthen the community in someway, but not elo. I just see no use for it. All it does is divide people. Whether they take their complaints vocally or not.
admin
By admin | Jan 11 2015 3:23 PM
Blackflag: OK, I consider the elo complaint kinda a separate issue, so I'll deal with that first. The purpose of elo is to give debaters a relative rating of strength. This means:
1 - able to match yourself better against opponents of your skill, and
2 - a goal for friendly competition

Neither of these divide people. The only problem is that people like you think a low elo is a bad thing. Reminds me a lot of those folks from DDO who lost in the first few rounds of the WODC, dropped out and ended up costing DDO the title in so doing. Those from edeb8 remained after the first few defeats and ended up doing much better in the end. So yeah, I really don't see how it would divide people.

On edeb8, there's a number of goals we want to fulfill with judging:
1 - to encourage as many judgments as possible on each debate
2 - to provide incentives for higher-quality judging
3 - to allow debaters to feed back to judges
4 - to prevent debaters from controlling the decision of the debate
5 - to facilitate as many good judging styles as possible

I think there's a natural progression:
1 - people start being too shy to judge
2 - people start engaging with debates and leave 1-point decisions (with no feedback)
3 - people get encouraged sufficiently to try to leave feedback, but their votes will probably not be very good at first
4 - hopefully debaters will then give those people useful tips, and their judgments improve

If I remove all judgments in part 3, they're likely to get discouraged and think they just can't judge well. If their vote is valued and appreciated, however, then things might be different. I'm not here to say "sorry, your vote sucks and has been removed", I'm here to facilitate an awesome experience for everyone. Instead, I think debaters should feed back to judges and give them a variety of perspectives on how they can do better. People have said things to me about my judgments and it's been helpful, but I hope this happens more often.

That being said I would remove votes in the following circumstances:
- one of the terms of use has been breached
- the user has been on step 3 for a long time and is clearly not making any effort to improve (I tend to find these users regress to step 2 though fairly quickly)
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