Electowiki talk:The electowiki handbook

Suggestions from March 2020

 * Conversation started: 00:47, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Here are some ideas I'd like to contribute to this article:

Instructions on how to write in the wiki should be separated between when you're using visual editing ("Create/Edit") versus "direct/source editing" ("Create/edit source"). In general, much can be learned about source editing by just clicking "edit source" on various articles and seeing how they were written (though be careful not to accidentally save your "edits" if you're doing this!) When you write "", this automatically allows you to type links in. When you write, on a separate line, "=== something something ===", this makes "something something" into the heading of a new section. Headings can be linked to; for example, writing "[[Rated method" takes you to the section in the cardinal voting methods article that speaks about approval ratings. Articles can be redirected to other articles; for example, if you go to rated method, that will take you to cardinal voting systems, and in the top left, you can click the "redirected from rated method" blurb in order to directly edit the rated method article/redirect link.

For writing on discussion pages (like this one), one can "reply" to someone else by putting a ":" before their reply, using an additional ":" than necessary to create a quote, and using four "~"s in a row (so but with 4 "~"s rather than 2) to "sign" (indicate who wrote that reply) their reply.

In terms of navigating the wiki, I'd suggest a "tutorial" or "new learner's guide" ought to probably start off by introducing them to rated and Condorcet methods, and IRV. It should probably teach them about majority rule-based ideas like the mutual majority criterion, and utilitarian-related ideas. I'd recommend giving people a cursory look at certain criteria, like the Favorite Betrayal and Later-no-harm criteria, which can really help narrow down options sometimes, and are often very important in helping people decide what they like in voting theory. There ought to be sections, so that people who want a "quick start guide" on PR can see all the relevant stuff (highest-averages methods vs. highest-remainders, what is free riding, sequential vs. optimal PR methods, etc.). And there should be some resources on how to practically implement various voting methods (i.e. how to use Approval voting, pairwise counting, or STV in real life situations), part of which should explain useful intersections between various things (for example, you can partially fill out a pairwise comparison table using IRV results, since whoever the IRV winner got a majority against, the IRV winner pairwise beats, and gets at least as many votes in their favor in that pairwise matchup as the size of their majority. So if there were, say, 5 candidates, and once one of them was eliminated, someone got a majority, then this means that candidate with a majority pairwise beats the other 3 uneliminated candidates in that round). BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 00:47, 17 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Yes, though these are general MediaWiki things that are covered by the MediaWiki help link. But maybe we need to have the basics here, too. — Psephomancy (talk) 00:23, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Talk page format

 * Conversation started: 01:20, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

I would like this page to have a good example of a talk page. I've created Template:TalkPageIntro and put that at the top of this page, and I put the old contents utoday's ISO date as the caption. I also put the date in using the same format. I'd also like to have a page at Help:Talk about how we format talk pages, but we should talk about that elsewhere. Oh, and I created Template:ConvStart, which I used (via "subst") to create the headers for each of the talk page sections. -- RobLa (talk) 01:20, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Merging with Help:Contents

 * Conversation started: 01:33, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

I think I'm going to start the merge of Help:Contents and electowiki:Help pretty soon. Maybe in the next 24 hours, but probably not. I think the final home is going to be over at Help:Contents, but I'm not sure. I may just bust up electowiki:Help. I feel like I'm talking to myself on this talk page, so I'll leave it at that. -- RobLa (talk) 01:33, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Support either. I'd say I might mildly prefer using the often under-utilized Help: namespace, with Help remaining created as a cross-namespace redirect. If it remains in the Electowiki: namespace, I'd still recommend a cross-namespace redirect from mainspace as it's more intuitive for users to search without the namespace prefix. I stumbled upon this wiki while finally getting a chance to check out your personal website. I think I've seen your name around on English Wikipedia, but not sure as we've interacted specifically there. Thought I'd better reply to this, so you don't feel like you're talking to yourself. I appreciate that you initiated a merge discussion on a new wiki. Dmehus (talk) 16:58, 8 June 2020 (UTC)