Electowiki talk:Editorial policy

Older Electowiki:Policy discussion

Prior to 2020-03-29, the text of Electowiki:EPOV lived on the Electowiki:Policy page. Hence, discussions about EPOV were directed to Electowiki_talk:Policy. In particular, there are these two discussions from late 2019 where the subject explicitly names "EPOV":

• Electowiki_talk:Policy#EPOV
• Electowiki_talk:Policy#EPOV discussion about Vote_Unitarity article

Please direct newer discussion about EPOV to this talk page. Thanks! -- RobLa (talk) 23:10, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Anonymous editors and EPOV

The Special:RecentChanges log has become dominated by edits from anonymous users. While I appreciate the value of anonymous editors in many contexts, and I believe that people who aren't at liberty to divulge their public identity should be able to participate, I tend to value the opinions of people who are willing to stake their personal reputation on their words. Having witnessed the dangers of undisclosed conflicts of interest on Wikipedia over the years, I'm always skeptical of people who hide behind pseudoanonymous identities.

Checking the validity of anonymously-contributed content is exhausting. It is not what I want to be doing with my life right now. However, because I personally own the domain names for electowiki.org and electorama.com, I have to. Whenever an anonmyous suggests allowing content on this wiki in languages that I don't understand, after having their content deleted in at least one case, it makes me trust that person a little bit less. Every kilobyte of anonymous content that gets added to Electowiki makes me dislike looking at Special:RecentChanges. My fear is that the quality of this wiki has been going down recently, but I honestly don't have enough time to read and understand it all. It's why I put "Investigate what it would take to deploy wikipedia:Flagged Revisions to Electowiki" on User:RobLa/TODO.

User:Psephomancy, I'm guessing you disagree with me about anonymous editors and contribution quality. I have several resolutions in mind for solving this problem, but I want to start with asking an open-ended question: what is your position on this? Back when I started Electorama.com in 2003, my hope was to create an activism infrastructure for the membership of EM list. When User:DanKeshet suggested creating a wiki, it seemed easy enough to do; Dreamhost had pretty good MediaWiki support back in 2005. And wiki.electorama.com became a runaway success for a while. But the spam fighting got to be too much, and my cocktail of MediaWiki extensions stopped working well together. It effectively caused Electowiki to go dormant in 2011 or so. In 2017, I began personally working on a migration to GitHub's wiki infrastructure. When you and User:Homunq pinged me from time-to-time, and (at a couple of points) there were people at C4ES that suggested that I assign "electorama.com" to C4ES. I've considered it (and still consider it from time-to-time), but RobLa-POV and C4ES-POV are slightly different points of view.

User:Psephomancy, I appreciate the work that did to evaluate MediaWiki hosting providers, and choosing Miraheze. I've been pretty happy with that decision, so much so that I joined the Miraheze board. I appreciate that the move to Miraheze has revitalized Electowiki, and I really appreciate the tireless work that you did in 2018 and 2019 to revitalize this community while I was focused on my day job. The modern Electowiki owes a lot to you, Psephomancy.

The good news is that "Electowiki-POV" (what we now call "EPOV") is largely compatible with RobLa-POV. "Electorama-POV" is a bit more compatible with "RobLa-POV" than "Electowiki-POV", but the difference between "Electorama-POV" and "RobLa-POV" is pretty negligible. With all of the anonymous editing is starting to move away from that. The discussion over on Talk:C4ES Election-Theory Forum is really driving that point home. For my continued involvement/support, I think we need to better align RobLa-POV and Electowiki-POV, and I think the first step is for the EPOV editorial board to come up with a policy about anonymous editing. Thoughts on how the EPOV editorial board will define the policy on anonymous editing? -- RobLa (talk) 22:54, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

I don't understand? I only see three anonymous edits in the last month? — Psephomancy (talk) 00:02, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

I'd say that it would be fine to greatly limit the power that anonymous editors (including me) have, both in terms of ability to edit articles, and being treated as equal stakeholders when making decisions or suggestions (such as adding translations, or deciding whether the abbreviation for Center for Election Science should be CES or C4ES). BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 00:04, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Ok, in Wikipedia terminology "anonymous" and "pseudonymous" are different things. Anonymous editors are the ones who post under IPs only, and pseudonymous ones post under an account without revealing their real name. Obviously I am 100% in favor of pseudonymous editing, and anonymous editing hasn't been a problem at all so far. It is few and far between, and seems mostly from people editing while accidentally logged out. — Psephomancy (talk) 00:13, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Just to add a bit of nuance, perhaps any restrictions on pseudonymous editors should focus on those who make many edits. It doesn't seem like we ought to restrict someone who makes an account to primarily edit or create a handful of articles. In addition, there could be some priority order to the articles such that greater restrictions are placed on someone editing something like the majority criterion versus some page that they themselves created, like Ideal Representation. BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 00:26, 17 May 2020 (UTC)