Guide
A spinning wheel is only as fair as how it's set up and run. If you're using one for something with real stakes — a raffle prize, a classroom assignment, a giveaway winner — a few small habits make the difference between a pick people accept and one they question.
The wheel gives every slice an equal chance proportional to its size. The most common way fairness actually breaks down isn't the spin itself — it's the list going in. If you accidentally add someone's name twice, or one prize gets listed three times while another is listed once, the odds are no longer what people think they are. Before spinning for anything that matters, read your option list back out loud once and count it.
Turn on "Remove winner after spin" before you start if each entry should only be able to win once — for example, assigning five different chores to five people, or drawing three distinct raffle prizes from one entry list. If you leave it off, the same name can be drawn again on a later spin, which is correct for things like "who presents first today" in a recurring rotation, but usually wrong for a one-time prize drawing. Decide which situation you're in ahead of time so you're not changing the rules mid-draw.
If the outcome matters to the people involved, spin in front of them (or on a shared screen call) rather than privately beforehand and announcing the result after. This is less about the tool being untrustworthy and more about human perception — a draw people watch happen is automatically more credible than one they're told happened.
Screenshot or screen-record the final wheel and winning slice before clearing it. If you used the Share link, save that link too — since it encodes the exact option list used, it doubles as a record of who was actually entered, which is useful if anyone asks later whether they were included.
A wheel alone doesn't guarantee everyone gets called on an equal number of times over a semester — pure randomness means some names will come up more than others by chance. If long-run fairness matters more than any single draw (like making sure every student presents roughly the same number of times), pair the wheel with "Remove winner after spin" and refill the list once everyone's had a turn, rather than resetting it every day.
Because the spin runs locally in your browser using standard random number generation, and because a shared wheel's option list is visible in the link itself rather than hidden on a server, there's no hidden step where a result could be swapped before you see it. The transparency is structural, not just a policy promise.