Electowiki talk:The caucus/Archive 2018

Below are conversations that occurred on Electowiki talk:The caucus back in 2018.

Cleaning up categories

There are many different variants of the same category names.

User:Jameson Quinn's definitions:

A note on terminology: “Electoral system” means all the election rules of a given country, including voter and candidate eligibility, elections for different offices, campaign rules, etc. “Voting method” is the formal mathematical part of that; the algorithm that determines what information must go on each ballot and how that information is aggregated to choose a winner. I’ve avoided the term “voting system” because it’s ambiguous; it could refer to either of the above, or to the specific machines used for casting ballots.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories/en#Redirecting_a_category says:

Like normal wiki pages, category pages can be redirected to other normal or category pages. However, this is not recommended, as pages categorized in redirected categories do not get categorized in the target category (bugzilla:3311). Some Wikimedia sites use a "category redirect" template to mark redirected categories, allowing manual or automated cleanup of pages categorized there.

Wikipedia style says

categories are almost always given plural titles and many templates are as well.

So I'll re-categorize each page under "voting methods" and delete "voting systems" categories. Psephomancy (talk) 03:39, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

StructuredDiscussions

Should we use the StructuredDiscussions extension for Talk pages? This wiki uses it, for reference: https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page

Psephomancy (talk) 02:45, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

Psephomancy, at this point, now that we seem to have a reasonably active community to watch things, I think this would be fine. I was a little worried about this back in 2018 when you first proposed this. Now (in 2020) that we have a lot of editors, and now that I'm a lot more comfortable with Miraheze, I think we can give it a shot, I'm not how much work migrating our existing talk pages to StructuredDiscussions would be at this point, but assuming we can make the shift without a lot of work on anyone's part, I'd be game for trying it out. -- RobLa (talk) 20:20, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm a little scared to click the button because I'm not sure exactly what it does and I don't want to screw things up for people. Will it enable the Structured Discussion on all blank Talk pages? Will it print any kind of warning or explanation or do we have to do that?

It looks like existing talk pages will be unchanged and need to be migrated, which is good. — Psephomancy (talk) 05:39, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Search Engine Optimization

Is there anything we can do to raise this site in Google results? If I search for "Summability criterion", wiki.electorama.com is the first result, but electowiki.org isn't on the first 5 results pages at all. The first result actually points to Category:Voting system criteria, which is weird.

If I search for a specific phrase "rather than the highest total score", Google only returns wiki.electorama.com

• Could edit MediaWiki:Pagetitle to say "Electowiki, the election methods wiki" or something like that.
• Could add a MediaWiki:Tagline
• I enabled https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiSEO, but not sure how to use it.
• This lists some things that can be done: https://seositecheckup.com/seo-audit/electowiki.org

— Psephomancy (talk) 22:42, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

I'll need to set up redirects as appropriate. The main trouble with doing this is migrating in a way that respects the Creative Commons attribution license, per my comments over on https://phabricator.miraheze.org/T3624 . We can do some soft redirects today, and in fact, I've done that with Summability criterion, and I've got some ideas for how I want to set up the Apache redirects. -- RobLa (talk) 01:14, 1 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure redirects are the problem, though. The site appears invisible to Google for some configuration reason. I tried adding it to Google SearchConsole, and testing https://electowiki.org/wiki/Proportional_representation, and got:

URL is not on Google This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn't indexed.

Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical Status: Excluded

Google-selected canonical: N/A

The site as a whole says "Processing data, please check again in a few days", so we'll see what it says later.

— Psephomancy (talk) 19:40, 1 January 2019 (UTC)

I turned on mw:Extension:Description2 extension and mw:Extension:OpenGraphMeta extension (which uses the former), and they seem to be working, except there are two description tags on the main page, one from the manual WikiSEO, and the other auto-generated from the first paragraph by Description2.

Google SearchConsole for https://electowiki.org/wiki/Median_Ratings says the same thing:

User-declared canonical None

Google-selected canonical N/A

While inspecting https://electowiki.org/wiki/Proportional_representation says it is in Google, I guess because it's linked from the main page?

Referring page https://electowiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

Another exact phrase search finds the wiki.electorama.com site, and also the electowiki.org URL, but that is hidden under "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 3 already displayed."

Maybe turning on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgEnableCanonicalServerLink would help? It seems to be enabled on Wikipedia. — Psephomancy (talk) 20:28, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Reception123:

So I'm looking at Google SearchConsole now that it's finished the Coverage report.

There are a bunch of URLs in the category "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" of the same form:

   https://electowiki.org/w/index.php?title=Voting_system&veaction=edit&section=10&mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile
   https://electowiki.org/w/index.php?title=Majority_Judgment&veaction=edit&section=2
   https://electowiki.org/w/index.php?title=Instant-runoff_voting&veaction=edit&section=11

Similar URLs also show up below the "omitted similar entries" fold at the bottom: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22districts+do+not+ensure+that+an+electoral+system+will+be+proportional%22&filter=0&biw=1440&bih=789

So I think it's deducing the wrong canonical URLs for certain pages, including the old domain, weird API URLs, etc. and so it hides the correct one. I think the only way to fix this is to add link rel="canonical" tags to each article, which I think you need to do using https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgEnableCanonicalServerLink Google doesn't seem to care about the og:url tag provided by WikiSEO extension.

That's the second method listed on https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

It's not possible to do the first method since that requires me to own both miraheze.org and electowiki.org and it seems like an obsolete method anyway. I don't think I have the power to do any of the others, either. — Psephomancy (talk) 02:57, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Redirector

You can install http://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ to automatically redirect your browser from wiki.electorama.com or electowiki.miraheze.org to the new domain electowiki.org.

Redirect:	*//wiki.electorama.com/*
to:	https://electowiki.org/$2

Redirect:	*//electowiki.miraheze.org/*
to:	https://electowiki.org/$2

— Psephomancy (talk) 21:58, 31 December 2018 (UTC)