Electowiki talk:Policy

Relevance to election methods

I just notice, the list of all articles seems to be almost entirely comprised of articles related to the science of election methods. I suppose, then, that articles like Robert's Rules of Order,VIRV, and Virginia would be out of place here? What do you think?

Is there another wiki that would be better suited to organizing for electoral reform? 24.154.8.81 08:31, 9 November 2006 (PST)

Electowiki is a great place to talk about electoral reform. Please continue. -- RobLa 21:45, 12 November 2006 (PST)

Articles about living people (BLP policy)

Electowiki hasn't had a policy for articles about living people. Wikipedia has a very complicated Biographies of living persons (WP:BLP) policy, which has evolved over the past several years to avoid problems like the Seigenthaler incident and also frivilous SLAPP lawsuits from people who fail to understand the Streisand effect. It seems that pages about living persons on Electowiki should either be user pages (e.g. Rob Lanphier) or short summary articles in the main namespace that point to the Wikipedia articles. I believe the article about Steven Brams sets a very good example (it's short, and points to a much more detailed article about its subject).

The policy I would like to enact:

Pages about living persons on Electowiki in the main namespace need to be pointers to Wikipedia articles, unless otherwise approved by the Electowiki site administrators.

Psephomancy, do you agree with this policy? If so, then let's make this the policy as soon as possible (and let's figure out if/when/how we allow exceptions). -- RobLa (talk) 06:30, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

In general, I think that anything that can be covered on Wikipedia should just be covered there, since it will be read by more people, maintained by more people, and won't duplicate effort.

Warren Smith doesn't have an article there, for instance, and if one was created, it might be deleted for being "non-notable" (maybe, maybe not, depends what publications he's been mentioned in).

So should we cover it here instead? I don't know.

I certainly don't think we need any general biographical information, like about their family or sports accomplishments, etc. If anything exists here, it should be limited to only neutral and verifiable points that are related to election methods (or related academic credentials). (But even then, there could be neutral and verifiable facts about election reform organization drama that it's better not to mention.) — Psephomancy (talk) 15:19, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

There are many very problematic issues with Electowiki articles about living people, not the least of which being that we allow pseudo-anonymous editing. So, for instance, I have no idea who Dr. Edmonds is, or how this person knows what they claim to know about Warren Smith. Because of that, I've become convinced that it is a candidate for speedy deletion, so I'm deleting it now. As the current policy states "Unless we specifically say so, many of the English Wikipedia's policies apply to us", and as of this writing, we haven't published a BLP policy that is different than English Wikipedia's policy.

When it comes to someone's User: page on this wiki, there is much more latitude (e.g. the user can choose to divulge as much or as little as they want). There's still a problem with obviously incorrect information, but we can at least make it clear to readers that we give users in the User: namespace more editorial control over the content there. For main namespace content, it doesn't seem smart to deviate very far from English Wikipedia's policies. -- RobLa (talk) 18:11, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

This is the first page I made and really the one I care least about. I am fine with deletion. The info I put there was from him and his webpage. Maybe we can just link to his own biography here http://scorevoting.net/WarrenSmithPages/homepage/myresume.html This would be a good policy in general. Most people have a page of their own with a biography --Dr. Edmonds (talk) 19:39, 25 November 2019 (UTC)