Category talk:Fails favorite betrayal criterion

Criteria as categories

I do not think it is a good idea to have criteria as categories. There are way too many and it will become cluttered. The Table of voting method criteria is a much better way to do this. Each element in the table should have a reference to a proof. --Dr. Edmonds (talk) 17:44, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

I'd mostly agree, though some criteria are rather good to document (i.e. voting methods that pass the Smith criterion should be in the "Smith-efficient Condorcet methods" category). BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 17:57, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

BetterVotingAdvocacy If they are classes of systems then fine but "methods which fail favorite betrayal" is not really a class of systems. I would think that classes are more design based like "multiwinner", "Cardinal", "sequential", ect.

I'm inclined to agree. I just cleaned this article up because I can't delete articles, myself, and because I didn't feel like I could make that call. User:Psephomancy, what's your opinion? Kristomun (talk) 19:29, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

I definitely disagree with removing criteria categories. Having an editable hierarchy of structured information about which systems meet which criteria is one of the main purposes of the wiki.

Having categories for which criteria a system doesn't meet is less obvious. The three truth values are

"meets criteria"
"fails criteria"
"don't know or haven't entered it yet"

Having negative categories lets us distinguish between cases 2 and 3, which is the motivation for the "fails compliance with" Wikibase property, but maybe that doesn't make as much sense for categories.

Note that these negative categories could be hidden from display at the bottom of articles by using __HIDDENCAT__ if clutter there is the concern. — Psephomancy (talk) 21:54, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Psephomancy. I am not disagreeing with keeping track of the information, I am disagreeing that this is the best method. I had suggested on the Electowiki_talk:The_caucus#Categories page that we make something like a w:Template:Infobox for systems. This could be preloaded with all the criteria and categorizations. Is that not a much better solution? If we could get that to autopopulate the Table of voting method criteria that would be really slick --Dr. Edmonds (talk) 01:06, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Well putting them in a table as nothing but wikitext would be far worse than categories, from a data structure perspective. We can at least query categories and do automatic stuff with them.

Wikibase would be more of a data structure than categories (and it supports references for each assertion), and could probably be used to populate the infobox templates, as well as maybe populating the categories(?). But someone has to figure out how to use that. — Psephomancy (talk) 01:26, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Just to add, it'd be nice to be able to represent certain relations among criteria, such as "between criteria A through D, you can either have A, B, and C, or C and D, but not all of them" or stuff like that. BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 01:31, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

I think that would be possible with Wikibase. It has things like d:Property:P2738 — Psephomancy (talk) 01:43, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

@BetterVotingAdvocacy and Dr. Edmonds: Something I just realized: The infobox template could add the categories automatically. You fill in the booleans for the infobox and it includes the category tags using template logic. Is that better for everyone?

(Also: This conversation topic applies to many categories, and isn't specific to this one. In the future, try to start such general conversations in Electowiki talk:The caucus, which is (supposed to be) the centralized discussion area. It would just make it easier to remember where the conversation was. Conversations on individual category/article talk pages should be about those categories/articles specifically.) — Psephomancy (talk) 04:50, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Just a note, the ping didn't work. I don't quite understand what you mean; could you give an example? I would greatly appreciate anything you can do to streamline the application of templates, since as of now I have no idea how to make this infobox thing work. BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 05:02, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Wikibase support

continuing from User:Psephomancy's suggestion of using Wikibase

User:RobLa, is this sort of wizardry something you know how to do? --Dr. Edmonds (talk) 02:28, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

User talk:Dr. Edmonds, I'm not sure how to do it. As of right now, adding Wikidata support is pretty low to Electowiki is very low on my priority list. Slightly higher on my list (but still low priority) is adding basic compliance electoral criteria compliance statements to Wikidata. I spent a little time editing over on wikidata.org, learning to to add positive conformance statements, which I started doing. For example, I added a statement that Copeland's method (d:Q5168347) complies with (d:Property:P5009) the monotonicity criterion (d:Q6902035). I made that change on January 29 (see oldid=1106408880) but I hit a brick wall when I tried to suggest a "fails compliance with" property. It seems that my suggested solution was not considered appropriate to a couple of Wikidata community members, and I didn't have the time to do what it took to solve the problem. My choices: a) more strenuously make the case for "fails compliance with", and build consensus around that or b) learn the alternative proposal. There was only one vote in favor of my proposal, and two votes opposing, though d:User:Omegatron also made a supportive comment without voting. Given the lack of support I was finding, it didn't seem worth my time.

A prerequisite for forking from Wikidata.org (by running a parallel Wikibase) would be to demonstrate that we've outgrown Wikidata.org. This wiki was initially started by a longtime Wikipedia editor who convinced me to host a place for not-yet-notable election methods. It seems to me that we can populate Wikidata.org with information on the election methods that are notable by Wikipedia standards (e.g. Approval, Borda, Bucklin, Copeland, and all the others in the comparisons table) and then create a more expansive database later. -- RobLa (talk) 03:36, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

OK, if the fancy stuff is out of reach then can we on the make something like a w:Template:Infobox for systems as described here Electowiki_talk:The_caucus#Categories . If you do one for FPTP ill propagate it to other systems. We might need a different template for single and multimember systems since different criteria apply. Also, for partisan systems.--Dr. Edmonds (talk) 06:07, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Template:Infobox was already here, but I've imported its dependencies to make sure it works. It should be used to make Template:Voting method or election method or whatever we're calling it, to put in the individual articles. Eventually we can use one of these as inspiration and make an infobox that gets its data from wikidata. Also I would prefer that any information about criteria that goes into an infobox also goes into the categories. — Psephomancy (talk) 02:22, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

How liberal can we be in creating infoboz properties? For example, I'd like to categorize methods by whether they pass the majority criterion for uncoordinated strategic voters in the 2-candidate case, whether they let a coordinated mutual majority force one of their candidates to win, etc. I also think having tiers of PSC-like properties would be great, but I want to understand how far we're allowed or supposed to go here. BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 07:51, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

I have no opinion. :) — Psephomancy (talk) 23:56, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

BetterVotingAdvocacy If you are willing to make the template I do not think anybody is going to criticize. Go nuts. --Dr. Edmonds (talk) 02:58, 27 March 2020 (UTC)