Talk:2382: Ballot Tracker Tracker

In the title text, Randall explicitly endorses candidates for one party. He's said things before to suggest which side he's pulling for, but has he ever done so explicitly like this? If not, it should be mentioned. DKMell (talk) 17:54, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

He endorsed Clinton in 2016 through a comic. https://xkcd.com/1756/ 108.162.216.22 14:41, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

Could this also refer to sites that track whether one’s ballot has been counted? --172.68.132.239 03:31, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

This sense of "calling it" is relatively uncommon, especially for non-native English speakers to encounter. Although having it in quotes is good, some explanation should be added in parentheses. 188.114.110.4 04:13, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

See English.stackexchange.com Barmar (talk) 07:50, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

I remember an earlier comic,Cueball trying to incinerate an incinerator.(xkcd1821),and people tracking trackers(xkcd2376),Maybe there should be a "meta-usage" category?(e.g using an incinerator to incinerate another incinerator,using a tracker to track a tracker etc.) Xkcdjerry (talk) 13:34, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

The current explanation refers to a ballot tracker as a government site, but I believe they're typically independently provided by either news organizations or political information websites. However, I decided not to edit the explanation yet until someone else confirms they have the same interpretation of the term "ballot tracker" here. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 14:27, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

Well, I see that the next paragraph talks about "ballot tracker" in the context of my interpretation, so I'm not sure whether to modify the first paragraph that mentions government sites or not, but I would support removing that first part and just simplifying it to talk about the news organization interpretation of the term. Other input from anyone? Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 14:31, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

I strongly agree that the correct interpretation for "ballot tracker" is the various sites that provided updates on the ongoing ballot counts at the various states. I think the first interpretation of sites where individual voters can check their ballots is wrong. It especially does not make sense to track how quickly those sites update, since one voter can only view the one site for their ballot, and can't see it updating at some frequency. On the other hand I was an example of the topic of this comic. I obsessively refreshed the New York Times tracking pages to add numbers to spreadsheets graphing trends while also refreshing the live blog at fivethirtyeight.com. As a result I noticed that the live blog quoted results from tracker site Decision Desk HQ several minutes before the same results from the states appeared on the NYT tracker page. I consider myself an example of the target of this comic using that interpretation. Bugstomper (talk) 21:39, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

The article that is linked to is not about tracking tracker sites. The article title is "Tracking Which News Outlets Have Called the Presidential Race in Each State". The article tracks which news sites have called which states. Each such news site presumably has a tracker page for each state in which they display the current reported vote counts. Cueball's tracker tracker is tracking how often each news site's tracker pages are updated with new counts. Each news agency has a "decision desk" which uses the data from their tracking page plus other related information to decide when they will declare a projected win for a candidate in a state. That is referred to as "calling" the race in a state. Bugstomper (talk) 06:45, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

Well now AP's called it. Biden won. bubblegum-talk|contribs 06:57, 8 November 2020 (UTC)
(hm, my name looks to be in a different font than the timestamp, odd)

Also, is anyone up for creating a recursive names category?

News organizations may have called it, but states still have to certify the results, and certification in some states can't happen until pending litigation has finished making its way through the court system, which will take a few weeks. Dogman15 (talk) 11:04, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

this makes me think of stud finder finder(Please Sign)

Which will be better, "recursive names" "recursive use“ or "meta-use"? (I think there's enough to make a category about -- 956,1821,2376 and maybe this one deciding on how it's interpreted). Xkcdjerry (talk) 15:32, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

How about just "Recursion"? --NotaBene (talk) 16:57, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

The Explanation gives me a good idea, "Rurcive Naming" will be nice.

There must be a a tracker that tracks when Randall updates the comic ... Where is that? How does it run? Is it open source? I want to make a tracker that tracks it ... 173.245.52.215 20:13, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

Are we sure this is cueball in the panel? I mean it looks like there is some hair on his / her scalp. --188.114.110.132 18:52, 10 November 2020 (UTC)