Talk:Reweighted range voting

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Renaming in April 2022

As of this writing, this article has the name "Reweighted Range Voting". User:Fsargent implicitly suggested renaming the article to "Proportional score voting", and was more explicit elsewhere. I wouldn't mind renaming the article, if for no other reason than to make it so that we can lowercase the first letters of the title (per the English Wikipedia "Manual of Style" regarding TITLEFORMAT). Should we rename "Reweighted Range Voting" to "Proportional score voting"? If not that, should we rename the article at all? -- RobLa (talk) 07:04, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

I would not support such a change for a few reasons. This system was invented (or possibly independently reinvented) by Warren Smith. He gave it that name and many people follow that name. To change it now to something which is not commonly used would be a strange move. I have never heard it referred to as that. Secondly, the proposed new name is too generic. There are many score voting systems which are proportional. A change of this nature may be misconstrued as a statement that it is the only or the best such system. Thirdly, if we were to rename it there are better choices. The system is based on "Sequential Proportional Approval Voting" so something more in line with that would make sense. However, there already exists "Sequential proportional score voting" and "Single Distributed Vote" which are different interpretations for how to extend SPAV to score ballots. And The conventions for naming systems is to try to make the name describe the system somewhat. While the descriptions normally only get at a part of the system the "reweighting" mechanism is the key component here and keeping that makes sense. I could see a change to "Sequentially reweighted score voting" since it adds the specification that it is a sequential system and uses the more modern "score" in place of "range". The shorter "Reweighted score voting" is already fairly commonly used. This is noted already on the page. The only motivation I could see for this renaming would be branding and lobbying but I do not think it would be justified to give this systems such a definitive name. --Dr. Edmonds (talk) 17:11, 13 April 2022 (UTC)
I understand why Felix Sargent or CES would want to rebrand RRV and start calling it Proportional Score for lay people, and I'm happy to use that language in that context, (we call Allocated Score Proportional STAR for similar reasons) but it's important to note that RRV is just one type of Proportional Score Voting. Allocated Score, Sequentially Spent Score, etc are also examples. A wiki should be explicit and technically correct. A wiki called "Proportional Score Voting" (or any other name for a family of systems- including the classic overly generic rebrand "Ranked Choice Voting") should make it clear that the term describes a family of systems, not one specific example. If RRV's inventor, Warren Smith wants to rename the method he has the right to do that, but he would likely pick a more unique name, as I know he has strong feelings on over-generic branding muddying the waters of voting reform in general. --Sarawolk (talk) 19:06, 13 April 2022 (UTC)