electowiki

Electowiki:About Electorama wiki

Revision as of 23:54, 21 April 2020 by RobLa (talk | contribs) (Copied text from Main page (oldid=10013). Will adapt in subsequent revision)

Welcome to Electowiki!

Election Methods

There has been an increasing awareness in many parts of the world of the effect that different election methods (voting systems, voting methods, etc; this site uses these words interchangeably) have on the quality and timbre of elections and democracy. For example, there are movements for proportional representation, Approval voting, Score voting, instant-runoff voting, and Condorcet methods. This site gives you a guide to what these things are, on pages categorized as follows:

  • Voting methods, the main focus of this wiki, describes specific methods for selecting between various choices, their implementation details and features.
    • Voting theory deals with the properties of voting methods and the criteria they can meet, scenarios in which they fail, etc.
  • Advocacy is for descriptions about real-world reform: organizations, legislation, lobbying, and arguments for choosing one reform over another.
  • Elections is for articles that analyze real or hypothetical elections under different methods, and examine their properties and outcomes.
  • Forms of government is the level "above" election methods: Representative vs direct democracy, government structure and formation, etc.
  • Voting mechanics deals with real-world implementation details, such as paper ballots and electronic voting machines.

Electowiki ties all of these together. 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, w:MediaWiki-based wiki dedicated to discussing election-methods related material. It is a spinoff of electorama.com, which was started in 2003 by RobLa as a complementary site to the election-methods mailing list (started in 1996 by RobLa).

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, RobLa registered "electowiki.org", and began slowly redirecting traffic from wiki.electorama.com to the site you see today.

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:

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.

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