Oops! Picture Story Challenge 2013

My average is only just a little higher than that, Alef, so I suppose I'm mean too! (not OLD, however!!)


Not necessarily. On the activity page you can see when other members are reading challenges and when they have voted. Many times I have seen names I am unfamiliar with and those not in blue--indicating reader status rather than author.

No matter how the voting goes, these challenges continue to generate a lot of interest, views and comments... so keep 'em coming!

I have refined my statistics a little while Nick is busy sleeping or working or whatever. A modifying factor is how many DIFFERENT authors we have in the contest. I went back to the Testament challenge (which is perhaps the previous challenge most like this one), and found that each author had in average contributed about 1.5 story. If the same is the case this time, we only have 48 contributing authors, and if they have given 400 votes each in average, it only accounts for around 19 000 of the 30 000 votes given so far.

I really do hope I will be able to finish reading all stories before the deadline. Apologies to the few I've missed if I didn't manage...

I only have access to the numbers that you can see. Februs can fill us in on more of the numbers. that's one of the things I love about the guy.

With 22.5 hours (and a likely last-minute push for reading/voting) yet to go, the number of votes per story has edged ahead of the Keyhole contest - 435 vs 433. Both are substantially ahead of the earlier contests. Even though there were fewer stories this time than last, reader/voters actually had to wade through more verbiage to give those extra votes - roughly 187,000 vs 175,000 words.

Februs could tell us whether the higher total is due to a higher average score being awarded by voters, or simply to more voters. Perhaps it was because I participated in the voting this time - though as stingy as I was in handing out votes, this wouldn't have contributed all that much.

Thats pretty judgemental, Rick!

I was told that the words from my story seemed to fly off the page..that's assuming the someone who read it knew that it was mine, of course. But wading, never!!!

Here's a quick stat to be going on with. This, assuming I didn't balls up the database query, gives the number of people who bothered to vote on the various challenges:

1: 134
2: 157
3: 150
4: 160
5: 79
6: 162
7: 186
8: 198
9: 230
10: 211

An hour and forty minutes to go, and there's a flurry of last-minute reading & voting. Exciting, huh?


I find it rather mind-boggling how few total votes there are given the number of people voting. Given the 32,527 votes as of this writing, each of of 211 voters has cast an average of 254 votes. This translates into an average of only 2.14 votes per voter for each of the 72 entries. Based on the self-reporting elsewhere in this thread, voters probably average at least 5 votes for each story voted upon. Clearly not all voters are voting on all stories. That is no surprise. there are lots of reasons for it. What IS surprising is the degree to which this is true.

I did a little analysis, making a set of (rather implausible, in my mind) assumptions. With 72 stories, there are likely about 50 authors represented. If roughly half of those authors, 25 of them, voted for only one story - their own - and agve it a 10, that would account for 250 votes. That seems like a high number of "bullet voters," but let's go with that for now. Then let's assume fully 50 reader voters made a quick visit to the Challenge, read and voted on only 5 stories each, giving them an average score of 5. That would be another 1,250 votes. Again, that seems like a high number of voters who merely dabble in the process. Next, let's assume that another 50 reader/voters start the process, fully intending to follow thorugh, but you know, life happens, and they, on average get only one third of the way through - 24 stories - giving the average score of 5. This is another 6,000 votes. Would we really have that many people get thwarted only a third of the way through? And next, let's assume yet another 50 reader/voters read diligently, but despite their best efforts, get only two-thirds of the way through, or 48 stories. THAT I can understand. If they give an average score of 5, that's another 12,000 votes. That leaves 13,072 votes from the remaining 36 voters, who we'll assume either work their way through to the end, or, falling a little short, give some kind of score to the unread stories just to be fair. That, too, comes out to an average score of 5 votes per voter for the 72 stories.

Quite frankly, the hypothesized situation above seems to have far too many voters casting minimal numbers of votes (at least for the reasons I postulated), and yet there have to be those kind of numbers to have as few total votes as we do.

Can anyone else offer some sort of explanation?

In the past there's been a great deal of debate about the voting but all the debate and conjecture as I've said numerous times previously is based on two totally flawed assumptions. One, that voters will use a common set of criteria on how to judge the entries and two, that voters are mainly voting consistently and sensibly. In which case the best thing to do is simply treat the voting as a bit of amusement and nothing more. The plus side of the challenges is that most authors should hopefully get a decent number of comments and their stories viewed by readers who previously were unfamiliar with their work.

Anyway, back on the stats front, 37 people only cast one single vote and several voted no higher than a 4 for any entry.

Dang! Even stingier than me!

And I wouldn't suggest changing how voting is done. I think it's as good as it's going to be. Any change would create it's own sort of problems.