Most of the time you want every name to have the same chance. Sometimes you very much do not, and pasting a name six times to fake it is both tedious and hard for anyone else to verify.
How to weight an entry
Add an asterisk and a number after the name. Aisha*4 gives Aisha four times the chance of an unweighted entry, and draws her slice four times as wide. The chance of any entry winning is its weight divided by the total of every weight on the wheel.
So a wheel containing Aisha*4, Ben and Chen has a total weight of six: Aisha wins four times in six, Ben and Chen once each. The picture matches the maths exactly, which is the whole point — an observer can check your odds by looking.
Good reasons to weight
- Bonus contest entries — earned by sharing, referring or entering early.
- Catching up — a student who has not had a turn this week gets a larger slice.
- Realistic odds — a promotional wheel where a small prize should genuinely come up more often than a large one.
- Availability — someone who can only take the task half the time gets half the weight.
Where it goes wrong
Weighting stops being a feature and starts being a problem the moment it is invisible. If you are running anything public, say who is weighted and why before you spin. A wheel where one slice is obviously enormous and unexplained does more damage to trust than no wheel at all.
The related trap is weighting a losing outcome so heavily that a promotion is effectively a near-certain loss while being advertised as a real chance. In many countries that is not merely bad manners; it is regulated. Be straight about the odds.
A quick sanity check
Add up all your weights. Divide each entry’s weight by that total. If any of the resulting percentages surprise you, your wheel is not doing what you think it is doing — adjust before you spin, not after.