Electowiki talk:The caucus/Archive 2020

Discussions started in the year 2020. Note: these discussions are archived, so please do not respond here, but instead create a new topic in Electowiki talk:The caucus.

Interwiki redirects
Whoa, I didn't know interwiki redirects worked!

The Center for Election Science

A little jarring that you silently end up on a different site, though. I wonder if there's a way to delay it momentarily. — Psephomancy (talk) 01:21, 8 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I was a little surprised when I encountered that too. I think I'm personally fine with it staying the way it is (immediate), but I probably wouldn't object if you figured out how to put some indication that the user is going to a different site.  Perhaps we should make the skin on this site a little more visually distinct.  Thoughts?  -- RobLa (talk) 02:59, 11 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Interwiki redirects can cause some issues, though, particularly with globally renamed users who have a global user pages. Often, their old username is preserved as a redirect to what's technically a locally non-existent page. Thus, it shows up on Special:BrokenRedirects. A workaround, which I adopted and which seems to be fairly common practice, is to simply convert it to a soft redirect, using some sort of interwiki soft redirect template. What I loved, though, was your inclusion of little English Wikipedia and MediaWiki logos to the right of any interwiki links. I assumed this is done through the interface in MediaWiki: namespace, but just wondering which file(s) control that. Very cool! Love that, as it provides the user/reader a visual cue that they're going to be leaving Electowiki. Dmehus (talk) 17:17, 12 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I love those interwiki links too (see Help_talk:Links for more) -- RobLa (talk) 06:04, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Categories
The list of uncategorized articles is growing over time, but I'd like it to always be shrinking to zero.

New articles were created by User:BetterVotingAdvocacy, User:Toby, User:Dr. Edmonds. Can you all try to add categories to new pages so they are easier to find and so they can show up in dynamic lists? (I think this will notify you since I mentioned you.)

I enabled the DynamicPageList extension, so we can do things like automatically list all proportional cardinal methods:

 category = Cardinal voting methods category = Proportional voting methods 

or all multi-winner single-mark methods:  category=Multi-winner voting methods category=Single-mark ballot voting methods  etc. — Psephomancy (talk) 03:11, 12 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Psephomancy I do not have the time to do this level of organization right now. There is already categorization for most of this on the pages Multi-Member System, Cardinal voting systems and the most high level one Voting system. You could just copy this structure. --Dr. Edmonds (talk) 04:04, 12 January 2020 (UTC)


 * User:Dr. Edmonds, I do not think that Psephomancy made an unreasonable request of your time, given your level of activity on this wiki. Please reconsider your response. -- RobLa (talk) 01:04, 13 January 2020 (UTC)


 * User:Dr. Edmonds I'm just asking that you put category tags on the new articles that you create. I'm not asking you to categorize other articles you aren't involved with.  As the creator of an article about a voting method, you're the most likely to be knowledgeable about which properties it has.  — Psephomancy (talk) 01:15, 13 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Psephomancy For the most part I thought I had been. I have done my best to come up with a taxonomy. Anyway, I finally have a little time to look into this. Is there a way we can build a template which could be filled out for each system? This would help with Taxonomy. Something like what exists for band like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallica page. There are several things which could be filled I will give an example for my system since I know it best

Number of Winners: Multi Winner Ballot Type: Cardinal Vote Target: Candidate (as apposed to parties in a partisan system) Selection Procedure: Sequential (Others being Bloc or optimal) Proportionality Class : Unitary (Others being Theile, Phragmen, Monroe or None) Single winner reduction : Score Party List reduction: Hamilton Method


 * Does this seem like a good idea? If standardized it could really help for quick comparison. This is just a first pass on what sort of things we could add to such a template. There could also be things like Inventor. First used. ect --Dr. Edmonds (talk) 17:51, 10 February 2020 (UTC)


 * You mean w:Template:Infobox? Yes, we could add something like that. — Psephomancy (talk) 18:24, 10 February 2020 (UTC)


 * This should help with categorization. Can you put one together hopefully we can come up with a format that would work for all multimember systems. Ill populate the pages if you can make one like the one I made above. --Dr. Edmonds (talk) 22:17, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

So I was thinking about this, and I'm wondering if we should change our policy so that voting methods go in *all* categories that apply to them, even if they are also in a sub-category of that category.

It's not always obvious which parent categories apply to a given voting method, and it would allow you to see all Condorcet methods on one page, for instance, without navigating into the the drop-downs for "Condorcet-reducible PR methods‎", "Sequential comparison Condorcet methods‎" etc. It would also allow the above DPL lists to work without needing to include sub-categories (which can only nest 2 deep anyway). Does this seem like a good idea to anyone else? — Psephomancy (talk) 01:29, 29 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Is there some kind of technological solution that would allow users to see all the Condorcet methods on on page if they wanted to, but otherwise would keep it the way it is now? I just think it could be intimidating for a new user to see all sorts of wonky Condorcet methods on one page and lose interest in learning about any of them, for example. BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 03:07, 29 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Not that I know of — Psephomancy (talk) 03:55, 29 February 2020 (UTC)


 * User:Psephomancy, I think my suggestion on this point would be that most articles should go into the deepest sub-categories possible, but for a minority of them (the most prominent ones, such as FPTP), they should be allowed to go into multiple categories where users might like to see them. Something like Schulze is probably the most prominent Condorcet method, for example, so it's reasonable to put it in both (Category:Smith-efficient Condorcet methods) and (Category:Condorcet methods) to maximize the odds that people to whom the information is pertinent will see it. BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 06:47, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Editing velocity
Bill Gates reportedly said "Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs". Code is frequently made more efficient and useful by removing lines of code, rather than adding them. I believe that bit of wisdom also applies to prose and articles on this wiki. Do we have the review capacity to deal with the current velocity of contribution to this site? I'm not sure. Having witnessed rapid expansion periods on Electowiki (where I was more tolerant of low quality prose) has left a difficult cleanup task. How can we ensure that all of us (myself included) can be proud of the quality of Electowiki when (at the end of the year) we look at what we've achieved in 2020? -- RobLa (talk) 23:29, 30 March 2020 (UTC)


 * See also Pascal: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal#Quotes. Or, for that matter "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure": initial conciseness is worth much cleanup.


 * I'm not sure, either. If we get overwhelmed, it might be a good idea to shift the EPOV further in favor of "summaries of what has already been discussed elsewhere" (i.e. referencing what has been said before on EM or in academic papers). Apart from that, and beyond keeping brevity in mind, I can't think of any simple solution at the moment.


 * If we had lots of users, we could experiment with Approval-y editing where the users could mark which paragraphs they consider important and not. But we don't have enough users for the jury theorem to work, and even if we did, just coding the thing would take a lot of time. Kristomun (talk) 00:07, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for weighing in so quickly! I've always loved the Pascal quote in that link above ("I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time"), but many of the others are also apropos. I think it would be fun to experiment with some sort of Approval-y editing method, but I also agree that it would take a lot of time, and the cost/benefit ratio is probably too high (and out of reach, at the moment).  -- RobLa (talk) 00:21, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

Editing queue
Here's an idea: for editors who make a lot of edits (like me), if they make more than a certain number of edits in a day then the edits over the threshold go into a queue. Every day that there are edits in the queue, some number of edits in the queue are automatically implemented. Also, other editors can peer review and approve edits you make, speeding or maybe even automatically getting them out of the queue and implemented. A further refinement of this idea would be to group edits by article (i.e. if you edit the FPTP article and that edit goes into the queue, and then you make a second edit, then both edits should be lumped together as one, so that they can more quickly leave the queue.) BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 03:40, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

EM list migration nominations

 * broken out from into separate topic by RobLa (talk) on 18:56, 31 March 2020 (UTC)'''

Thinking idealistically and a bit ambitiously (and a bit humorously), imagine asking on the EM mailing list to focus on identifying which articles here deserve to be moved to Wikipedia, and asking for help refining those articles. I realize this is a fantasy, but sometimes that's a good starting point for figuring out which path to pursue. (I think it's in Alice In Wonderland where someone says something like "If you don't know where you are trying to go, then it doesn't matter which path you choose.") VoteFair (talk) 00:33, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
 * This is an interesting idea. It seems that the Electowiki community and the EM list community are starting to diverge.  Given the mixed comfort levels of using EM list by the current Electowiki community, and given the excruciatingly slow adoption of Electowiki by the EM list community, and given that Wikipedia editing is something that there's only a subset of us that are comfortable linking our Electowiki identities to our Wikipedia identities, I can see all sorts of complicating factors. What do other people think? -- RobLa (talk) 18:56, 31 March 2020 (UTC)