User:RobLa/Journal

From: Rob Lanphier (User:RobLa) Date-moved-from-homepage: 04:32, 19 May 2020‎ (from User:RobLa) Updated: 12:18, 3 March 2022 (UTC) Subject: My journal for electowiki-related editing

Welcome to my journal!

User:RobLa/Journal contains my electoral reform thoughts, and might not be specific to Electowiki. That said, it's largely been a journal of electowiki-related thoughts and ideas. I treat it sort of like a blog, but I have a blog at < https://robla.blog >, and that's where I do my "blogging". My editing in each section below has been pretty free form. See my "2020-05-18" entry for more of my thoughts on using a wiki as a journal

2022-03-15

 * 01:15, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

1/ Two things: a) beware the Ides of March, and b) I heard an interesting rumor about Ranked Robin voting. I'll leave it at that, because it's dinnertime here in SF.

2022-03-03

 * updated 12:13, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

1/ Well, 2022-03-03 isn't going to be as cool as 2022-02-02, since English speakers were all celebrating 2/2/22 (and the ambiguity therein). 3/3/22 is ambiguous too, but it's not as fun to talk about. Anyway, I moved several old Electowidget pages into my user space (i.e. to User:RobLa/2009 Burlington, Vermont Mayoral Election - Kiss Voters, User:RobLa/2009 Burlington, Vermont Mayoral Election - Montroll Voters, User:RobLa/2009 Burlington, Vermont Mayoral Election - Smith Voters and User:RobLa/2009 Burlington, Vermont Mayoral Election - Wright Voters). And I've stayed up way too late again, editing electowiki.

2022-02-02

 * updated 06:32, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Happy Groundhog Day! (well, at least in the Pacific timezone anyway). Last night, I stayed up way too late working on things related to EPOV and Code of Conduct (more the latter than the former). See the "Bill of Responsibilities" I've been working on over at https://robla.miraheze.org/ for the past several years. I started it over here on electowiki, but I realized I kinda liked editing a wiki of my own as I was thinking through how I want the documents there structured. Also, I was on the board of Miraheze when I started up the "robla.miraheze.org" wiki, and I wanted practice maintaining wikis as I was learning some of the depths of MediaWiki's access-control system.

2022-01-15

 * updated 21:47, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

1/ Hi folks. First off, belated "Happy New Year!" to everyone. Secondly, you may be wondering about the slowness of electowiki over the past few days, and some of the chaos in the last 24 hours. I may write up more about this later, but see recent conversations on "Community noticeboard" on meta.miraheze.org for a bit more about the recent server migration. Having been involved in many server-software upgrades and at least a couple of datacenter migrations back in my days at Wikimedia Foundation, I know how complicated it is for a non-profit organization with a reasonably large professional staffs to make big changes to their MediaWiki hosting configuration. I'm very grateful to Miraheze for doing their work with a small, volunteer staff. Hopefully, I'll get around to writing more on the topic...

2021-12-14

 * updated: 08:55, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

1/ My journal has now become the place where I whine about not updating my journal on electowiki. As anyone who has paid attention to Special:RecentChanges can see, I've been editing other pages a lot, but not this one. Oh well....

2021-06-25

 * updated: 00:18, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

1/ I haven't been keeping up with my unstated goal of welcoming everyone who contributes (and I haven't even looked at "User:RobLa/Welcome" in a while), but so much has changed over the past year that ... eh, whatevs. There's an interesting discussion happening over on the birdsite regarding the Condorcet winner criterion, and I'm delighted that we have a new contributor here (User:AmericaRepair). As I've said in many other places, I was an "all-third-party-all-the-time" POTUS voter back in 1992, 1996, and 2000, so I can relate to AmericaRepair's journey. Anyway, I should rename the Condorcet winner article to match up with its enwiki counterpart.

2021-05-27

 * updated: 08:41, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

1/ I added this earlier: User:RobLa/ABIF. ABIF stands for "Aggregated Ballot Image Format". When election results are published in IRV elections, it's typically in a very unreadable format. ABIF is intended to be a simplified format that can be used as election shorthand on the EM-list as well as in the /r/EndFPTP forum.

The format is a riff off of a format recently proposed on EndFPTP. The user who proposed it was focused on score ballots. My format also works with ranked ballots, without forcing phony ratings into the format. I merged that format with the format that /user/jman722 proposed on reddit. I used back in 1996 (see User:RobLa/TPJ, and made the beginnings of a specification in my email to the EM-list. It seems it would be interesting to write a parser for my proposed format, and does some cleanup on raw ABIF files.

2021-01-01

 * 09:33, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

1/ Happy New Year everyone!!!! I decided to fix up the Main Page of electowiki, and then got distracted figuring out how to use Special:CategoryTree, and experimenting with transclusion. I also rewrote the lead section above.

2020-12-28

 * updated: RobLa (talk) 01:45, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

1/ I learned about Legiscan today. Here's an example of a search:
 * search for "approval voting" OR "ranked choice voting"

I suppose it's going to be important not to hammer their search engine too badly...

2020-12-27

 * updated: 09:40, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

1/ I don't remember when the last time I donated to Miraheze, but I'm probably due. I'm a Miraheze board member, but that doesn't exempt me from donating when I can.

If you rely on electowiki, you should donate too. The staff has been busy working over the holidays to make sure we don't get hacked, and to ensure that the security of the website is sound. That's not as easy as you might think. Hosting a website that anyone can edit is challenging. We even (currently) allow people to edit quasi-anonymously, if you don't mind giving away your IP address (and I'm asking myself if that's a good idea).

Miraheze accepts donations via GoFundMe, PayPal, GitHub Sponsors or even BitCoin. See electowiki:Miraheze fundraising for more details specific to donors from electowiki, or see Donate (the meta.miraheze.org page) for more general details on donating for all users of Miraheze's services. Thanks!

2020-12-02

 * updated: 08:29, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

1/ Wow, it's been a while since I've written anything here. I've been a very active editor on this wiki, but haven't done much metawriting. Anyway, I think I want to create an article for Free & Equal Elections Foundation, since Wikipedia already has an article for the organization (see Free & Equal Elections Foundation). Someone reminded me earlier today (er... Monday) about a forum they held late last year.

2020-10-07

 * updated: 22:18, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

1/ The debate is happening this evening. For those of you that don't read UTC, I'm writing this on a delightful Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco. Well, it looks delightful out there if you don't look too hard. The AQI (according to Purple Air) is roughly 130 to 140, which isn't great. I haven't been outside in days, so I'm not an authority on what constitutes a "beautiful" day in SF. Anyway, we're about to have a debate this evening! With plexiglass! (there's a lowercase "P" on "plexiglass" to make it clear I'm not referring to Plexiglas, though maybe it will have some Plexiglas(tm) acrylic ).

2020-08-29

 * updated: 10:15, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

1/ There's call happening on Sunday by the California Clean Money Campaign. I really shouldn't stay up this late, btw....

2020-07-10

 * updated: 05:41, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

1/ been playing around with Flow on electowiki. I've left things in kind of a weird state. More in a bit....


 * updated roughly: 06:18, 11 July 2020 (UTC) (or 11:18pm PDT)

2/ I was starting to get optimistic this morning when I figured out the hierarchy of things in the lingo of "StructuredDiscussions"


 * 1 - Board (a long-lived discussion board)
 * 2 - Topic (a topic that generally is assoicated with a page)
 * 3 - Comment (a dated message that potentially starts a discussion)
 * 4 - Thread (the replies to "3-Comment")

The challenge that the developers have is that they're trying to replace "Talk:" pages on Wikipedia. I was at Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) when this project was started (back when WMF called it "Flow"). It was meant as a replacement for "LiquidThreads". Like almost any name, the name "Flow" was flawed, and was baked into the code. There seem to have been more name changes since then, but many of the administrative features still say "flow" or "Flow".

"StructuredDiscussions" is a mouthful (and I'll sometimes accidentally omit a letter), but I'm starting to see the strategy for wider deployment on MediaWiki sites (like electowiki). I think it makes sense to limit the number of people that can deploy a "Board", but then have as many "Topics" as people want within a board. I may write more about this later after I make the bug reports in the necessary place (and potentially dig into the code; my MediaWiki+PHP skills are a little rusty, but I can still find my way around the codebase)

2020-07-09

 * updated: shortly after midnight PDT on July 9th

1/ Well, VisualEditor is still kind of tough for editing journals (see Help:VisualEditor). Oh well.


 * updated: 07:24, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

2/ putting in a clean timestamp for my second journal entry of July 9th. But really, I should be getting to bed!

2020-07-08

 * 06:57, 9 July 2020 (UTC)'

1/ interesting....: https://metavote.netlify.app/

2020-07-06

 * updated: 04:22, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

1/ I'm enough of a n00b admin that I may be very close to accidentally deleting this log event from the database:

Selected log event: * (Logs) 00:49, 24 May 2020 RobLa created page EM-list ‎ (#REDIRECT Election-methods mailing list)


 * updated: 05:32, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

2/ I'm a little worried that electowiki is getting jealous (per my tweet on the subject: )


 * updated: 05:39, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

3/ Adding a "Footnotes" section to my journal (see User:RobLa/Journal)

2020-07-05

 * updated: 09:47, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

1/ I'm staying up way too late. I was able to get the Electorama site over on Medium set up though: https://medium.com/electorama/

Also, I did some minor tweaks to Electorama.com. See https://github.com/electorama/electorama-website/blob/master/README.org

2020-06-30

 * updated: 21:48, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

1/ Some typos are hard to fix: (like Template:Electorama!/doc)


 * updated: 01:22, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

2/ The "Electorama" misspelling in my first journal entry of the day had many cascading effects. I'm still figuring them out.

2020-06-28

 * updated: 06:14, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

My edits from today (which is still June 28 in PDT).


 * Talk:The Center for Election Science ‎ I moved the C4ES Election-Theory Forum over to Project:C4ES discourse.org server. More discussion over on that page:
 * Project_talk:C4ES discourse.org server
 * The Center for Election Science - now links to electionscience.org (note: I did this after putting the redirect on [[Wikipedia])
 * Discourse.org - ‎"Discourse" is software created by the hosting company "Discourse.org". See wikipedia:Discourse.org. It's not clear if it's a for-profit or non-profit company based on their website.
 * Project:C4ES discourse.org server - Used VisualEditor to remove duplicate reference to Felix's announcement
 * C4ES discourse.org server ‎-> Project:C4ES discourse.org server
 * Moved C4ES Election-Theory Forum to Project:C4ES discourse.org server. This is about to become of much less import to the electowiki community.

2020-06-25

 * updated: 23:03, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

1/ I want to start replacing a lot of the templates that were copied over from Wikipedia over to this wiki. There was a lot of cargo cult copying of templates that I didn't even fully understand myself. A lot of the Lua and other template magic that is way too complicated for the skill level of electowiki editors who specialize in electoral theory.

2/ I made my first Quora post today (titled "Pseudoanonymous identities (and how to spell "pseudoanonymous""). It was about the C4ES decision to shut down the C4ES Election-Theory Forum (currently found at https://forum.electionscience.org ).  I hope that Internet Archive is able to back it all up so that we can still have reliable citations on this wiki and on Wikipedia.

2020-06-24

 * updated: 23:46, 24 June 2020 (UTC)

1/ I wanted some help on using PrefixIndex; more specifically, the act of transcluding them. That turned into quite an adventure, editing mediawiki.org and en.wikipedia.org. Whee!.

Anyway, I'm trying to come up with a sustainable way of including events on electowiki, like the C4ES call they're having later today on Zoom about Colorado. Perhaps transcluding an events page (from Events, perhaps) would be good. Or we can just have subpages for events (like Events/June 2020. Much to think about....

2020-06-17

 * updated: 03:01, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

1/ I did some editing on the other wikis. And then I also did many more edits that represent yakshaving. If you don't know what I mean, go look it up on Wikipedia. Actually, don't; go search your favorite search engine and find the Seth Godin piece. His blog has a search engine of its own: https://seths.blog/?s=yakshaving. You can also find it on Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q16911347. Perhaps I should create a template for linking to that entry on Wikidata:. Nah, that would be yak shaving.


 * updated: 05:46, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

2/ Well, there are a lot of confused bald yaks roaming around now....

2020-06-16

 * updated: 04:05, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

1/ I created an Advocacy/Europe page earlier today. It's not very good, but it's a stub we can use to fill some stuff in.

My most recent work today has been on RobLaWiki.

2020-06-15

 * updated: 06:21, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

1/ I'm going to letting VisualEditor completely maul the section headings. (meh!) Though I'm not sure what it tried to do to my 2020-06-12 entry....


 * updated: 06:33, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

2/ I spent a big chunk of today working on electowiki. I've been having insights regarding the complexity with templates and categories. I also see that I'm going to need to stop using VisualEditor if I want to keep using the "" trick (the 5 tilde trick). I'll probably need to create a subst template to insert the current UTC time.

And VisualEditor still wants to maul my June 12 entry. This time, I'm going to let it maul it.

2020-06-14

 * updated: 02:15, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

1/ well, I ended up doing more today on electowiki than I was planning to. I actually followed through on the hardest part of the Category:Voting methods rename. It's now Category:Electoral systems. I think. I sure hope I did it right....


 * updated: 03:34, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

2/ whoops.... looks like I botched my last journal entry. Lots more editing has been happening....


 * updated: 07:19, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

3/ I made the big rename of Category:Voting methods to Category:Electoral systems. This aligns us with English Wikipedia (see: Electoral systems). I haven't yet done the bulk rename, but I think it's better to wait until the morning before making a massive change like that. There are a lot of articles in Category:Voting methods, and it's not clear that a bulk rename is the wisest option.

2020-06-12

 * updated: 04:38, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

1/ About an hour ago, I updated User:RobLa/Welcome. I wanted to highlight that the current Code of Conduct is in need of a revamp. I also linked to https://robla.miraheze.org/wiki/Bill_of_Responsibilities, which is where I plan to develop a framework for creating codes of conduct.

In totally unrelated news, Miraheze has some code-of-conduct work that they're doing. I may explain it more on my Miraheze:Meta journal

2020-06-11

 * updated 22:02, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

1/ Ok, I'm going to try making this JournalUpdate using. Next time, I'm going to just type in the raw wikitext generated (which is ). But a lot of my wiki edits are just copypasta of what I wrote earlier.

The C4ES Discord server is getting a lot of activity because of the Pacific chapter set of meetings that happened last night. I should write up more later (or provide links). But part of the flurry of discussion has nothing to do with the meeting, which is this image: https://imgur.com/7gkCWNp. More on that later...

2020-06-08
1/ The rename of Category:Voting methods to Category:Electoral systems needs to happen. There truly is not a good reason why this hasn't happened already, other than that I've let myself get distracted with other things.

Speaking of other things to get distracted by, I have a third wiki: https://robla.miraheze.org. I may be journaling more over at https://robla.miraheze.org/wiki/User:RobLa/Journal (or maybe I'll just journal at https://robla.miraheze.org/wiki/Journal ). I haven't even uploaded a proper logo to wiki #3, but that should happen soon.

2020-06-07
1/ Some editing inspired by discussion on the C4ES Discord server. See Special:Contributions/RobLa in the past few hours.

2020-06-05
1/ I'm going to use the bulleted list to break things up today:


 * wiki editing minutia
 * I'm not going to use the Template:fauxheader on the top of this page after all. I'm just going to create it by hand.
 * VisualEditor seems to want section headings to be like  and not like , and dirties up my diffs when I try to use it.  Grrr....
 * EndFPTP discussion about Schulze method
 * I added this to the Schulze method article:
 * "What are the key disadvantages of the Schulze method?" (2020-06-04) - a discussion started on EndFPTP regarding the possible disadvantages of Schulze's method.
 * I decided to participate in the discussion. Here's the link to my comment, which resulted in a discussion about Wikimedia's use of Schulze:
 * https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/gwik8c/what_are_the_key_disadvantages_of_the_schulze/fsx6w2e/
 * One of my former WMF colleagues (Brad Jorsch, one of the devs who worked on Extension:SecurePoll, and was the main developer in the 2014 SecurePoll redesign project) found a few links to give me in my general request for links:
 * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Board_elections/2011/Post_mortem#Voting_process
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Arbitration_Committee_Elections_December_2019#Voting_system
 * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2013
 * EM list discussion about Score Sorted Margins and Sequential Monroe voting
 * Ted Stern sent out an interesting email about ^those methods
 * http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2020-June/002531.html
 * The math is a little much for me to parse out right now, and I haven't read the electionscience forum thread from January that he linked to. But Ted always does really clear-headed analysis, so I kinda want to figure out the math at some point.

I have more thoughts, and things to put on my User:RobLa/TODO, but first, I should go have dinner.

2/ I forgot to mention that the conversation over on the C4ES Discord server yesterday led to that person joining electowiki: User:Acadia. The writeup is here: Approval Scored Voting (ApSV). I haven't had the chance to read this deeply. It's almost certainly going to need to be renamed to conform to the standards here, and the article needs a lot of work, but it's good to have new contributors who are active in other forums.

2020-06-04
1/ Much to talk about today. I added a "fauxheader" template to the top of my journal page. I think I like that format, so that it's really unambiguously clear that each page in my subpage namespace is from me (User:RobLa), so that I don't have to keep referring to myself in the third person. I also just added an "updated" field, so that I can use the " " to insert today's date. It's going to add it in UTC, but ... well... we may all have to get used to UTC.

I also accidentally switched into VisualEditor for a second, which ended up changing a LOT of the whitespace in my document. I'm kinda surprised that that happened, but it was fairly easy for me to recover from.

Anyway, I'm adding this journal entry because I wanted to highlight a conversation I've been having over at the C4ES Discord server. One of the people there was promoting "Approval scored voting". It's interesting (to me) how Google Docs is starting to become competitive with wikis as a technology. I still prefer using MediaWiki though, and it seems that the person promoting "approval score voting" may be as well. So we might see them over here.... (?)

2/ I've created Template:fauxheader, and I've even updated this page to use. And I've updated User:RobLa/fauxheader to use Template:fauxheader. Much updating!

2020-06-01
1/ I had a delightful conversation with Robert Bristow-Johnson yesterday. Our email interview has resumed, which electowiki readers can find at User:RobLa/Burlington2009. I may set up a redirect in the main namespace to that interview.

Also, a couple comments over on reddit about "ranked-choice" vs "instant-runoff" (in EndFPTP) inspired me to reply:


 *  I generally call it IRV/RCV, just to acknowledge the fact that FairVote has successfully co-opted the "ranked choice" name, but also to clarify that I'm specifically referring to the single-winner STV variant known as "Instant runoff-voting" on Wikipedia. I've attempted to document the change in name over on electowiki: 

...which I posted after I updated Instant-runoff_voting.

2020-05-30
1/ This is my first update using VisualEditor. It looks like I need to add "templatedata" to Template:JournalUpdate, so that I can make the UI a little easier to use. That reminds me; I really want to work on porting Electowidget to Lua at some point. So much to do.

Anyway, I keep adding redlinks to this page faster than I'm removing them. For example, I still haven't started a journal over on English Wikipedia, but I plan to: wikipedia:User:RobLa/Journal.

I want to finish up the interview I started with Robert Bristow-Johnson about the Burlington 2009 election: User:RobLa/Burlington2009. I got distracted with some of the debates over here about pseudoanonymous editing (see User:RobLa/Pseudoanonymity). The interview format that I want to work out is one where I ask a question, and get an answer that's no more than a paragraph or two, and isn't too complicated, and isn't too hard just to cut-n-paste into this wiki (for people who aren't really into editing wiki pages). Hopefully, if we can work out a debate format, we can make it easier to have larger discussions, and maybe even have civilized written debates here on electowiki.

I think I want to host a debate or two about things like important election method criteria (User:RobLa/criteria) or many other debatable topics. I want to describe my thoughts on debates at User:RobLa/debates, but not right now.

2020-05-29
1/ I missed yesterday's entry, but made an entry on my journal on a different wiki: meta:User:RobLa/Journal. I received a reminder yesterday that there's a lot of stuff that I promised to do at the last Miraheze board meeting.

For those just joining us: as of January 2020, I had joined the Miraheze Board. In March 2020, I attended my first board meetings, for which the minutes had been published: ( and ). I took on several action items, which I noted on my "TODO" list on the Miraheze "meta" wiki. I agreed to do that stuff before the shutdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic really started to kick in. But I've had some time lately, and I want to make a little more progress before the next board meeting. Which should be soon. I should look into when that is...

2/ I found a useful query: All users that have edited electowikiwiki. Note that "electowikiwiki" is this wiki as it existed since 2018, as opposed to electoramawiki, for which there's a different list: All users that have edited electoramawiki

2020-05-27
1/ I've started editing myndmesswiki a little bit more today, and wrote my first journal entry over there in a while (see https://myndmess.miraheze.org/wiki/User:RobLa/Journal#2020-05-27 for my latest journal entry there). Like I said over there, I should pay attention to Special:RecentChanges on this wiki. I should also pay attention to many other special pages (e.g. Special:ActiveUsers, Special:WantedPages, etc). I should create a list of special pages for me to pay closer attention to, and put it at User:RobLa/SpecialPages.

I also want to add some local namespaces over here. I'll describe more about what I want at User:RobLa/LocalNamespaces.

2020-05-26
1/ There's a new category we should probably have: "events". I'm not going to create it yet, but I'm going to create a redlink for User:RobLa/Events, and then create a wiki page there that links to a draft page dedicated to the 2019 elecoral reform symposium. I'll keep it all in my User/RobLa space for now....

2/ I started User:RobLa/Events, and started a section [User:RobLa/Events, which may become User:RobLa/2019 Electoral Reform Symposium and then 2019 Electoral Reform Symposium. We'll see. I also created User:RobLa/ActiveUsers as a means for me to track the folks that have been active in the past 30 days. I may also just make a static copy that I continually update for my own purposes. TBD....

2020-05-25
1/ This will probably be my only update from today. I've made a lot of edits today. RobLa's contributions before end-of-day 2020-05-25. I'm not sure where to begin, but I'm really happy that we have a new contributor: Special:Contributions/Michael P Shannon. See User talk:Michael P Shannon for my welcome message.

I'm still considering what I hope to see out of a conflict of interest policy, and have taken the liberty to write up some guidelines. But I also have a lot more thinking and writing to do about the topic, which I'll make findable from User:RobLa/COI -- RobLa (talk) 06:14, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

2020-05-24
1/ I think I want to use Template:JournalUpdate not just here, but on all of the wikis that I edit (even English Wikipedia). It'll involve some copying stuff around. I suppose that my myndmess journal is likely to be my "home" journal, so I'll start there.

And there are some promising developments over on the C4ES Discord server regarding PLACE FAQ and other articles of that ilk. Come join us to see what we're talking about.

2/ Well, I've fallen down the rabbithole of editing again. This time, I've fallen down the rabbithole of editing Template:TopNavCat, which I've copied over from. There are going to be many redlinks in this journal entry, which seems to be my M.O.

3/ Now I'm mucking with User:RobLa/sandbox and User:RobLa/Ambox. But it's time for me to get back to editing Template:TopNavCat

4/ Yup, myndmesswiki: is almost certainly going to be my metajournal.

2020-05-23
1/ I didn't get around to filling in yesterday's redlinks. I ended up creating a Discord server to chat with longtime friends (and no, you probably aren't invited :-P ). Creating Discord servers is pretty easy, which of course can lead to fragmentation and silos, but on the plus side, the user ids have an interesting design. I think I want to say more about this over at my myndmess journal myndmesswiki:User:RobLa/Journal when I get a chance.

There was a discussion on the C4ES Discord server about making it easier to find. And (quite awesomely), there is now an easy to remember URL to get to it: https://electionscience.org/discord. We should update the C4ES Discord server page to just link to the new URL.

I should post some of the history of EPOV that I'm writing up over in C4ES Discord over here on this wiki. There's a lot of things I should do, though....

2/ I have some thoughts on "User:RobLa/proof by intimidation". I think I want to make this part of the "Bill of responsibilities" that I'm working on for code of conduct conversations. Hopefully more later....

2020-05-22
1/ I just want to make sure I get this journal update here quickly.....

2/ Whew, got my last edit in before the 23:59:59 (UTC) on 2020-05-22. I'm still going to use 2020-05-22 for today's journal entry, because it's still nice and sunny here in San Francisco on May 22, and I'm not sure that I care that it's 2020-05-23 for everyone in the "UTC+x:00" timezones. I suppose if we get an editor from Japan or Guam or Australia, then we can worry about it. But I suppose it's just one more reason why I should fill in the redlink for User:RobLa/timestamp. And perhaps I should create a redlink for User:RobLa/redlink.

I started doing some editing of the myndmess wiki earlier today, and updating "User:RobLa/Journal" on the myndmess wiki. Since that wiki is a fresh wiki, I can use what I've learned to start fresh and come up with some best current practices for some of the wikis I'm an admin on. I'd love to have y'all help me editing the Myndmess wiki too (I think), though given that we haven't worked out how the editorial board is going to work over here on Electowiki (and what "EPOV" is), I suppose I should pick which wiki I'm going to focus my energy on. TBD....

Anyway, I see that folks already responded to some of my talk page messages for today. I'm going to manually create a link for my contributions for today: RobLa's contributions before end-of-day 2020-05-22. <- That's a template just begging to be written in Lua.

2020-05-21
1/ I've made a couple fixes today, but I've been getting off to a late start (and a late end) every day. I think I'd like to come up with a way of adding " " to my journal, and having that show up as RobLa's contributions before end-of-day 2020-05-20

Actually, what I'd really like to use is " ". The five tilde trick (e.g.  works really well for datestamping raw wikitext, though the timestamps are kind of a mess. Yet another thing for me to write about: User:RobLa/timestamp.

Speaking of things for me to write about, I should write about what someone should find when they visit "compromise" or "pushover" on this wiki. I should write about what I find at User:RobLa/compromise and pushover. I can see by hitting "preview" that (as of this writing) "compromise" is a redlink, but "pushover" isn't. Interesting....

The compromise vs pushover thing came up because I'm really impressed with Clay Shentrup's brief description of "compromise" and "pushover" (see "Strategy with STAR voting and IRV" written 2020-05-20 by Shentrup).

Speaking of Clay Shentrup, it seems that we should allow links in the main namespace for everyone who is notable in the electoral reform community. Not just folks who have published many papers and became academically famous (like Kenneth Arrow and Steven Brams) but folks like Clay Shentrup and Aaron Hamlin and Felix Sargent and everyone who is making a difference today, and is willing to put their name and face behind the cause. And it shouldn't just be white dudes; I realize that United States currency is almost exclusively white dudes, but the names on Electowiki shouldn't be that (even though I'm making that mistake here; d'oh!).

More thoughts here later (today, hopefully...)

2020-05-20


1/ I was going to try using VisualEditor to edit this, but I think I'll still use plain old Wikitext. I'm in the process of convincing C4ES to use "C4ES" as their official abbreviation. Wish me luck!

I suspect how I'm going to use this journal is to create a lot of redlinks for myself, so that I don't have to distract myself by looking up the correct link. For example, the EPOV board (User:RobLa/EPOV board) needs to come up with a policy about user pages (User:RobLa/UserPages). We also need to come up with a policy on pseudoanonymous editing (User:RobLa/Pseudoanonymous) I think I want to get some consensus here for an interwiki link to "myndmess" (a wiki I started as a free Miraheze wiki, see User:RobLa/myndmess to learn more about what I'm talking about). Fortunately, I was able to finish this journal entry before midnight UTC. See User:RobLa/UTC for my thoughts on using UTC for everything....



2/ Oh, that's right, I also wanted to write about what our conflict-of-interest policy is going to be. Since we might have editors closely associated with C4ES or FairVote or any other organization with a possible conflict of interest, that could be a big problem. I really appreciate the leadership shown by the equal.vote, since IIRC, we have two editors from that organization here that have already made significant contributions. I don't always agree with them, but that's not as important as having an honest relationship with the editor community. I'll (probably) say more about this at User:RobLa/COI.



3/ Well, that was dumb. I misspelled a link in the recent change: https://electowiki.org/w/index.php?title=User:RobLa/Pseudoanonymity&oldid=11279. Ooops! Too late. Well, I guess I can't fix broken links in my Twitter feed, either....

4/ Much editing about identity, and User:RobLa/identity. There might be a good discussion about identity over at User_talk:RobLa/identity

5/ I keep adding more redlinks, and not removing things. For example, we have Electowiki:MediaWiki and Help:VisualEditor, but we don't yet have Help:MediaWiki. I'll make that tomorrow, though. In the meantime, it's time to create a TODO item for myself over on User:RobLa/TODO ("fill in redlinks on User:RobLa/Journal")

2020-05-19

 * v4; updated at 01:22, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

(v1) - Here's a few things I'd like to do today


 * Build a boilerplate for welcoming new Electowiki editors (see User:RobLa/welcome_boilerplate for where I plan to put it)
 * Start a discussion about image policy that isn't on someone's talk page
 * Finish up the talk page discussions I was very recently involved in
 * Continue the User:RobLa/Burlington2009 interview where I dropped it
 * Probably some other things

Since "today" is still 2020-05-19 for me in PDT, I still have a few hours left. That is, I observe Pacific Time, which means that it's only 5:11pm or so here, and it's not even dark yet.

(v2) - Also, I'd like to add a thing or two above to User:RobLa/TODO. And I'd like to create a template for generating the "updated at" thing just below the caption. I think I know how I want to do it; I'll probably put it at Template:JournalUpdate.

(v3) - It's been taking me longer than I hoped to create Template:JournalUpdate. MediaWiki templates are big brain teasers. And it looks like I still have another thing to fix. This is what's getting inserted right now when I put " ":


 * updated 00:58, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

So I should fix that. And fix " " (with no default parameter 1) while I'm at it....

(v4) Template:JournalUpdate is good enough for now. I figured out that this syntax should work for the "v=" parameter to generate the little "v4; " bit at the beginning of the line:

...which is just silly. What I want to be able to write in my wikitext is this:

Actually, what I really want is to be able to write is this:

...and then have the full line that I'm manually creating get generated, but I'll have to futz with that some other day.

2020-05-18
One key difference between a wiki journal like this one and a blog is that the author can edit the content of the day at any point during the day. And that's what I reserve the right to do. "2020-05-18" doesn't end in this journal until 11:59pm Pacific time. And I may keep editing until 11:59pm Hawaii time (or later). Consider yourselves warned.

As can be seen from my contributions over the past few days, I've been pretty active on this wiki. But not as active as other folks here. It made me a bit worried that we weren't reviewing the content as quickly as we need to.

It's pretty clear that we need to better establish policy on this wiki, so that the Electowiki:Editorial board knows when to step in. And the editorial board is probably going to need to establish a place and a time for private meetings. That hasn't happened yet.

We do have a few unofficial places to chat about Electowiki. See Category:Forum for the list of forums. I should probably add one more, which is the "#electowiki" channel on the C4ES Discord server. Y'all can ping me there; I'm "robla" there, too.

2020-05-04
May the 4th be with you! I have some thoughts about how we should talk about Burlington 2009. I plan to capture them at User:RobLa/Burlington2009.

2020-04-22
In 2020, I've had a few things that I'd like to do with Electowiki. My main role so far has been:


 * 1) Primary liaison with Miraheze. The site doesn't host itself, and the Miraheze SRE team does an amazing job ensuring the site stays usable. See more about my Miraheze work over at meta:User:RobLa/TODO.
 * 2) Continuing my role as bureaucrat and administrator for Electowiki.

See User:RobLa/TODO if you're interested in my Electowiki TODO list.

2019
During most of 2019, I was focused on my role as Director of Core Infrastructure at Internet Archive (IA). When I left IA in November, I wrote my "End of a Chapter" blog post on November 5.

In November and December, my activity here on Electowiki really picked up. Additionally, I started speaking with the folks at Miraheze, and by the end of the year, it became clear that I was joining the Miraheze board. See my blog post about the history of Electowiki and my involvement with Miraheze (titled "Why donate to a non-profit with a hard-to-pronounce name?") for a detailed history of why I got into electoral reform and found myself working with Miraheze.

2018
2018 was the year that User:Psephomancy did 90% of the work migrating Electowiki over to Miraheze, and I puttered around for the next year or so doing the last 10%. When it was mostly moved over, I started using Miraheze as a place for drafting up my ideas for MAF and MATT.

MAF and MATT
A couple of new voting systems I worked on in late 2018 as possible alternatives to California's jungle primary:


 * Majority approval filter (MAF)
 * Maximum approval top-two (MATT)

...and a draft thing:


 * User:RobLa/runoff