Electowiki:About Electorama wiki

Electowiki is a website which describes a variety of different election methods, and their effect on the quality and timbre of elections and democracy. Much of the site focuses on electoral systems, describes specific methods for selecting between various choices, their implementation details and features as well as the theory behind it. Additionally the site contains information for activists, articles that describe outcomes of specific elections (both real and hypothetical), variousforms of government throughout the world, and the mechanics of voting, such as paper ballots and electronic voting machines.

There is a vast literature on the theory behind these systems: What criteria can you use to judge whether a particular method works well? What strategies will different systems encourage voters to use? To the best of our ability, we record the collective wisdom of scholars and enthusiasts, and work together to create a comprehensive reference for all to use.

History

Electowiki was started in 2005 by Dan Keshet and Rob Lanphier (RobLa) as a free-content, MediaWiki-based wiki dedicated to discussing election-methods related material. It is a spinoff of electorama.com, which was started in 2003 by Lanphier as a complementary site to the election-methods mailing list (started in 1996 by Lanphier).

In the twelve years between 2006 and 2018, Electowiki was hosted at wiki.electorama.com. In 2018, Psephomancy ported the wiki.electorama.com content over to electowiki.miraheze.org, hosted by Miraheze. In response, Lanphier registered "electowiki.org", and began slowly redirecting traffic from wiki.electorama.com to the site you see today.

Journal

Below is a reverse chronological set of site notices, which also serve as a slightly-more detailed history of this wiki. than the paragraphs above.

2019-12-09 note from RobLa

Last night, I set up redirects from almost all of the main namespace content on wiki.electorama.com to point here (e.g. almost all of the main namespace pages on wiki.electorama.com). As of right now, the pages are explicitly listed, so new pages created on wiki.electorama.com won't automatically redirect, and the page histories for everything should be intact.

2019-12-01 note from RobLa

Some way-too-detailed extra history expanding on the history above:

In the twelve years between 2006 and 2018, Electowiki was hosted at wiki.electorama.com (and as of this writing in December 2019, the 2005-2018 content is still there). However, spambots made it increasingly difficult to offer users access to open wiki. Anti-spam plugins were added, and RobLa eventually gave up on getting the cocktail of web-of-trust MediaWiki plugins on wiki.electorama.com to work the way he'd envisioned them working.

While RobLa was (slowly) working on plans to migrate the site away from MediaWiki, he encouraged others to set up static sites elsewhere, and use hosts that allowed for static-site hosting. Nevertheless, Psephomancy ported the wiki.electorama.com content over to electowiki.miraheze.org, hosted by Miraheze. In summer of 2018, RobLa registered "electowiki.org", and worked with Psephomancy and the Miraheze staff+community to make electowiki.org work, and designed the 2018-2019 electowiki.org logo. Over the next few months, RobLa started redirecting pages at wiki.electorama.com over to electowiki (e.g. the 0-info_LNHe article). More aggressive moves are intended in the not-too-distant future.

What I've added to the top of the page is a much shorter version. -- RobLa (talk) 06:39, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

2018-09-19 note from RobLa

I've set up https://electowiki.org as a domain that points here. https://wiki.electorama.com still exists, but we'll gradually deprecate it as the content settles in over here. Elements of wiki.electorama.com will remain over at a static site at electorama.com.

2018-09-01 note from Psephomancy

This is a mirror of Electowiki, for trying out Miraheze hosting.

The original is at https://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Main_Page

Status:

• Encoding errors have been fixed (old vs new)
• Broken images have been resurrected
• Some images have been switched to use Wikimedia Commons (Example)
• Some spam deleted
• VisualEditor enabled
  • The Wikipedia feature that automatically generates references from URL/ISBN/DOI does not exist here, but you can use Wikipedia's VisualEditor to generate it, and then copy and paste the reference to this VisualEditor.
• Graph extension enabled (Example)
• Math works (old vs new)
• Interwiki links to Wikipedia work: w:Election
  • Added icons to Wikipedia interwiki links (not sure if good idea): Oregon
• Some interwiki templates work (Example)
• Imported some templates and their styles from Wikipedia: Example
• YouTube videos can be embedded (Example)
• Image annotations are enabled (Example)

Any changes to the original after 2018-08-26 are not included here (but those edits are just redirecting to the new domain anyway).

Both wikis are licensed under CC BY-SA.

Edit histories imported from the old wiki contain names like imported>RobLa instead of RobLa, though user pages were imported, too. So you can take a user like imported>Username and visit that user's page at https://electowiki.org/wiki/User:Username . Hopefully this meets the criteria for attribution required by the CC BY license.

We will modify the edit histories to link directly to user pages if that becomes possible in the future. See https://phabricator.miraheze.org/T3624

The site is currently hosted on the Miraheze wiki farm, which is volunteer-run and funded entirely by donations.

2005 original "About" page

Electowiki was launched by Dan Keshet on January 26, 2005, as a new free-content wiki dedicated to discussing election-methods related material. This wiki is intended first and foremost for the election-methods@electorama.com and Electorama community. The site is administered by Dan Keshet and Rob Lanphier. For more information about why this resource was created (i.e. why not just use Wikipedia?) as well as other information, see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list.