User:RobLa/Journal

This is going to be where keep a journal of my Electowiki-related thoughts and ideas. Sort of like a blog, but I have a blog at https://robla.blog , and that's where I do my "blogging". This will be my journal writing about Electowiki-related stuff. Moreover, my editing of the section for the day will be pretty free form. See my "2020-05-18" entry for more of my thoughts (that I wrote on May 18th).

My journal contains my electoral reform thoughts generally, and might not be specific to Electowiki.

2020

2020-05-21

updated 22:04, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

1/ I've made a couple fixes today, but I've been getting off to a late start (and a late end) every day. I think I'd like to come up with a way of adding "{{contribs|RobLa|before=2020-05-21|tz=PDT}}" to my journal, and having that show up as RobLa's contributions before end-of-day 2020-05-20

Actually, what I'd really like to use is "{{contribs|RobLa|before=~~~~~|tz=PDT}}". The five tilde trick (e.g. ~~~~~ works really well for datestamping raw wikitext, though the timestamps are kind of a mess. Yet another thing for me to write about: User:RobLa/timestamp.

Speaking of things for me to write about, I should write about what someone should find when they visit "compromise" or "pushover" on this wiki. I should write about what I find at User:RobLa/compromise and pushover. I can see by hitting "preview" that (as of this writing) "compromise" is a redlink, but "pushover" isn't. Interesting....

The compromise vs pushover thing came up because I'm really impressed with Clay Shentrup's brief description of "compromise" and "pushover" (see "Strategy with STAR voting and IRV" written 2020-05-20 by Shentrup).

Speaking of Clay Shentrup, it seems that we should allow links in the main namespace for everyone who is notable in the electoral reform community. Not just folks who have published many papers and became academically famous (like Kenneth Arrow and Steven Brams) but folks like Clay Shentrup and Aaron Hamlin and Felix Sargent and everyone who is making a difference today, and is willing to put their name and face behind the cause. And it shouldn't just be white dudes; I realize that United States currency is almost exclusively white dudes, but the names on Electowiki shouldn't be that (even though I'm making that mistake here; d'oh!).

More thoughts here later (today, hopefully...)

2020-05-20

updated 23:06, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

1/ I was going to try using VisualEditor to edit this, but I think I'll still use plain old Wikitext. I'm in the process of convincing C4ES to use "C4ES" as their official abbreviation. Wish me luck!

I suspect how I'm going to use this journal is to create a lot of redlinks for myself, so that I don't have to distract myself by looking up the correct link. For example, the EPOV board (User:RobLa/EPOV board) needs to come up with a policy about user pages (User:RobLa/UserPages). We also need to come up with a policy on pseudoanonymous editing (User:RobLa/Pseudoanonymous) I think I want to get some consensus here for an interwiki link to "myndmess" (a wiki I started as a free Miraheze wiki, see User:RobLa/myndmess to learn more about what I'm talking about). Fortunately, I was able to finish this journal entry before midnight UTC. See User:RobLa/UTC for my thoughts on using UTC for everything....

updated 23:36, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

2/ Oh, that's right, I also wanted to write about what our conflict-of-interest policy is going to be. Since we might have editors closely associated with C4ES or FairVote or any other organization with a possible conflict of interest, that could be a big problem. I really appreciate the leadership shown by the equal.vote, since IIRC, we have two editors from that organization here that have already made significant contributions. I don't always agree with them, but that's not as important as having an honest relationship with the editor community. I'll (probably) say more about this at User:RobLa/COI.

updated 00:28, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

3/ Well, that was dumb. I misspelled a link in the recent change: https://electowiki.org/w/index.php?title=User:RobLa/Pseudoanonymity&oldid=11279 . Ooops! Too late. Well, I guess I can't fix broken links in my Twitter feed, either....

updated RobLa (talk) 00:59, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

4/ Much editing about identity, and User:RobLa/identity. There might be a good discussion about identity over at User_talk:RobLa/identity

updated 07:39, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

5/ I keep adding more redlinks, and not removing things. For example, we have Electowiki:MediaWiki and Help:VisualEditor, but we don't yet have Help:MediaWiki. I'll make that tomorrow, though. In the meantime, it's time to create a TODO item for myself over on User:RobLa/TODO ("fill in redlinks on User:RobLa/Journal")

2020-05-19

v4; updated at 01:22, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

(v1) - Here's a few things I'd like to do today

• Build a boilerplate for welcoming new Electowiki editors (see User:RobLa/welcome_boilerplate for where I plan to put it)
• Start a discussion about image policy that isn't on someone's talk page
• Finish up the talk page discussions I was very recently involved in
• Continue the User:RobLa/Burlington2009 interview where I dropped it
• Probably some other things

Since "today" is still 2020-05-19 for me in PDT, I still have a few hours left. :-D That is, I observe Pacific Time, which means that it's only 5:11pm or so here, and it's not even dark yet.

(v2) - Also, I'd like to add a thing or two above to User:RobLa/TODO. And I'd like to create a template for generating the "updated at" thing just below the #2020-05-19 caption. I think I know how I want to do it; I'll probably put it at Template:JournalUpdate.

(v3) - It's been taking me longer than I hoped to create Template:JournalUpdate. MediaWiki templates are big brain teasers. And it looks like I still have another thing to fix. This is what's getting inserted right now when I put "{{JournalUpdate|~~~~~}}":

updated 00:58, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

So I should fix that. And fix "{{JournalUpdate}}" (with no default parameter 1) while I'm at it....

(v4) Template:JournalUpdate is good enough for now. I figured out that this syntax should work for the "v=" parameter to generate the little "v4; " bit at the beginning of the line:

{{JournalUpdate|~~~~~|v=v4; }}

...which is just silly. What I want to be able to write in my wikitext is this:

{{JournalUpdate|~~~~~|v=4}}

Actually, what I really want is to be able to write is this:

{{JournalUpdate}}

...and then have the full line that I'm manually creating get generated, but I'll have to futz with that some other day.

2020-05-18

One key difference between a wiki journal like this one and a blog is that the author can edit the content of the day at any point during the day. And that's what I reserve the right to do. "2020-05-18" doesn't end in this journal until 11:59pm Pacific time. And I may keep editing until 11:59pm Hawaii time (or later). Consider yourselves warned.

As can be seen from my contributions over the past few days, I've been pretty active on this wiki. But not as active as other folks here. It made me a bit worried that we weren't reviewing the content as quickly as we need to.

It's pretty clear that we need to better establish policy on this wiki, so that the Electowiki:Editorial board knows when to step in. And the editorial board is probably going to need to establish a place and a time for private meetings. That hasn't happened yet.

We do have a few unofficial places to chat about Electowiki. See Category:Forum for the list of forums. I should probably add one more, which is the "#electowiki" channel on the C4ES Discord server. Y'all can ping me there; I'm "robla" there, too.

2020-05-04

May the 4th be with you! I have some thoughts about how we should talk about Burlington 2009. I plan to capture them at User:RobLa/Burlington2009.

2020-04-22

In 2020, I've had a few things that I'd like to do with Electowiki. My main role so far has been:

1. Primary liaison with Miraheze. The site doesn't host itself, and the Miraheze SRE team does an amazing job ensuring the site stays usable. See more about my Miraheze work over at meta:User:RobLa/TODO.
2. Continuing my role as bureaucrat and administrator for Electowiki.

See User:RobLa/TODO if you're interested in my Electowiki TODO list.

2019

During most of 2019, I was focused on my role as Director of Core Infrastructure at Internet Archive (IA). When I left IA in November, I wrote my "End of a Chapter" blog post on November 5.

In November and December, my activity here on Electowiki really picked up. Additionally, I started speaking with the folks at Miraheze, and by the end of the year, it became clear that I was joining the Miraheze board. See my blog post about the history of Electowiki and my involvement with Miraheze (titled "Why donate to a non-profit with a hard-to-pronounce name?") for a detailed history of why I got into electoral reform and found myself working with Miraheze.

2018

2018 was the year that User:Psephomancy did 90% of the work migrating Electowiki over to Miraheze, and I puttered around for the next year or so doing the last 10%. When it was mostly moved over, I started using Miraheze as a place for drafting up my ideas for MAF and MATT.

MAF and MATT

A couple of new voting systems I worked on in late 2018 as possible alternatives to California's jungle primary:

• Majority approval filter (MAF)
• Maximum approval top-two (MATT)

...and a draft thing:

• User:RobLa/runoff