Talk:Main Page
In addition to the listed voting methods (e.g. proportional representation, IRV, Condorcet), this page should mention other prominent voting systems, including plurality voting, plurality with runoff, and approval voting.
Old discussion moved to Project:The caucus.
Alternatively, there should be a link to an editable main page. This would allow the main page to be free from vandalism, while at the same time allowing a single point for the editable hierarchy.
The current situation where people cannot create a link to a new page in some kind of top level category page does not encourage people to create new pages.
For example, the front page could be changed to: (or something similar done by someone with better wiki formating skills that me)
I have also created a Main Index page.
Introduction Page
Welcome to Electowiki! This is a wiki associated with Electorama, the Election-methods mailing list, and communities of election-minded people.
Main Page
The Main Index contains a listing of all the categories.
Purpose of Wiki
Wikipedia is not a research community.
Wikipedia only wants well-established ideas and facts. New systems, new methods for evaluating systems, new insight, and new jargon are invented frequently on the mailing list. These ideas need a place to grow up to before they are notable enough to be included in Wikipedia. Electowiki can be this research community; Wikipedia cannot.
Electowiki strives to be accurate and informative. But many of us research not just for knowledge, but also for change. Electowiki can be the place where we collaborate on arguments for change, craft draft letters to use when we write to groups where we are involved, et cetera.
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. There are movements for proportional representation, instant-runoff voting, Condorcet. This site gives you a guide to what these things are and other less well know methods.
But it also goes one step further: 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? We record the collective wisdom of scholars and enthusiasts, and, by working together, hope to create a canonical reference for all to use.
About the project
We are a wiki! That means, anybody can get involved. We are free content. That means, we offer a license for anybody to copy and modify our works. To learn more about us or how to edit, see the Community Portal and Frequently Asked Questions! This project begain in January, 2005, so it is young yet. However, much of the content is built on top of past free content writings on election methods.
Electowidget
This site also hosts Electowidget, a plugin for MediaWiki for conducting online elections using advanced electoral tallying methods.
See a list of all pages on Electowiki
--Raphfrk
Cleaning up categories
There are many different variants of the same category names.
User:Homunq'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)