User talk:Dr. Edmonds

Welcome!

Hi Dr. Edmonds! First, a belated welcome! We appreciate getting contributions of original material to complement (and potentially replace) a lot of content that was copied to this wiki in 2005.

I only just saw the thread on the "Mirror of ElectoWiki" thread on forum.electionscience.org that you seem to have been a participant in. While I think there's a lot of interesting content over on rangevoting.org, there's also content that I don't agree with, and that (in my vague recollection) I think many people on the election-methods mailing list also didn't agree with. We need to make sure that electowiki.org content is generally well-vetted on a trusted forum (e.g. election-methods mailing list, reddit's /r/EndFPTP).

Anyway, I'll try to keep up and clean up some of your work, but as you can see, I haven't been able to keep up with the pace that you've been posting stuff. I'll try to keep pace, but you can help by being rigorous about linking to Wikipedia articles (rather than creating new original content here) and aligning the article names with Wikipedia style (per w:WP:CAPITALIZATION).

I'm looking forward to editing electowiki.org with you! -- RobLa (talk) 04:54, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks RobLa Much of the content I have posted so far had been collected from a lot of sources and condensed privately for my own reference. There are several documents put together by Equal Vote as well as stuff on the CES forum that I have added. reddit's /r/EndFPTP tends to be fairly amateur and I would prefer to source content from published papers and books. I have a few experts who I have arranged to write specific pages and I have set up skeletons to facilitate that. My understanding was that electowiki intended to be more detailed and in depth than Wikipedia so if we can have a better page then lets do so. There is a lot of content on wikipedia that nobody outside of FairVote agrees with. I am happy to have both and/or all opinions on electowiki and keep politics out of it. A good example is my rewrite of Proportional Representation. I was very biased and inaccurate. I have updated it to contain a more nuanced and detailed explanation. I do apologize for any formatting, spelling and grammar errors I have made. I intend to come back and proof read everything. As for the content on rangevoting.org, could you elaborate on what you disagree with? There is a lot of unpolished steam of consciousness type pages but the core stuff it reasonable. In my experience people tend to site it like we would want them to site electowiki. And for the record Warren is happy for us to take any content from there we wish to and says as much on the site.

Form letter welcome message :)

Hi,

Belated welcome to the new Electowiki! See User:RobLa and Electowiki:About for notes about the migration.

Let me know on my talk page if there's anything I can help with, if you know of any deleted articles on Wikipedia that could be resurrected here, etc.

This runs on Mediawiki, so it has a lot of the same features as Wikipedia, but is missing a few (like automatic citation generation) and has a few that Wikipedia doesn't (like support for inline YouTube videos). Images from Wikimedia Commons can be used directly without needing to be uploaded. Templates can also be transcluded from other wikis, though it's better to export and import them.

The wiki is 14 years old and has never had a ton of activity, so the goals/policies were never really solidified. Your input is welcome, especially on how to handle the separation of biased advocacy from neutral informative content (which are both welcome). See Electowiki:The caucus for the discussion topics and Electowiki:Policy. — Psephomancy (talk) 17:20, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

Moving pages

Hi, I just saw that you've manually moved Reweighted Range Voting and Sequential Monroe voting. For future notice, you can rename or move pages by clicking the "More" dropdown on a page (next to the star and "Search Electowiki") and then choosing "Move". This will preserve the page's edit history, which manually moving it won't. (I did the same mistake myself with Maximum Constrained Approval Bucklin :-) If you'd like to preserve the edit history of the two pages you've already moved (i.e. undo the manual move and do a proper move), User:Psephomancy can probably help you. Kristomun (talk) 13:08, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

OK thanks for the heads up. I should have done it that way. --Dr. Edmonds (talk) 19:34, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Valuing the time of your readers

You linked to Government formation from Main Page, which was a very bold move. That seems fine; being bold is encouraged in the wiki editing community (e.g. w:WP:BOLD on English Wikipedia). However, you'll note that English Wikipedia has many other guidelines for article creation (e.g. w:Help:Your first article). Over on the "Talk:Government formation" page, I referred to rev 9532 of "Government formation" as "a long, uncited essay written exclusively by a single author, with links to other articles buried in prose." I'll admit that that assessment was a bit blunt (sorry about that!).

Your response was "To be clear there is nothing that is opinion and to call it an essay is a little weird. I'll admit, I didn't have the time or inclination to provide a careful reading of your article draft, but honestly, it was a long read, and my time is valuable. Moreover, the time of the readers of this site is also valuable. I'm grateful that User:BetterVotingAdvocacy read it and was able to point out some basic problems with your draft article.

Your response to User:BetterVotingAdvocacy on Talk:Government formation indicated that you forgot about "you Condorcet people", and then brushed off the problems of linking to an unfinished article from the Main Page with "This is how wiki pages should work". Perhaps, but that's not how pages on this wiki work. Especially wiki pages linked to from the Main Page of Electowiki. If you would like me to carefully read and copyedit your work, you should ask me about my hourly billing rate for that. If you expect me to volunteer for that; no, I'm not volunteering to carefully read and copyedit the Government formation article. I would rather move it to your user space until it is ready to be linked to from the homepage. Could you be a little more respectful of my time, and the time of the readers of Electowiki? -- RobLa (talk) 04:25, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

RobLa I realize this is your wikipage but if you want people to spend their time adding to it you should show some appreciation for the time they put in. Your power on this site has given you an overinflated sense of self importance. Last week you were using this power to demand that several people spend their time explaining a well accepted concept to you or you would not let the statement on the page. I do not recall any of them charging you for their time. This is a collaborative community and if you keep acting like the king here I am not going to be able to find people who want to contribute. This is only a tool and there are others. I was the one that spoke to a few dozen experts and talked them into adding content. The recent upswing in new content was largely because User:Psephomancy and myself persuaded many people from the CES forum and other groups that it was worth while to contribute. I was just about to do the same for the other advocacy topics and had hoped that "Government Formation" could serve as a Kernel for this. As for the new page that you really want to trash, User:BetterVotingAdvocacy (who has also added a ton of content lately) pointed out that Condorcet methods were not in the discussion of government formation so the wording was unclear. Condorcet methods are not in this discussion at all by any group or member of parliament I have worked with on this. This means it was a pretty easy thing to leave out. He fixed it as I would expect and I appreciate the insight. You are trying to phrase it in a very different way than what actually happened. This is not good for the community. You criticized the content without even reading it. There are tons of stubs and low quality articles all over this site. I have already fixed a ton of them and I had intended to keep going. However, if you say that all new content must be 100% perfect and not have any gaps (even those which exist in the advocacy and literature) you are making this work impossible. I think its weird that advocacy is mentioned on the main page at all. I added a link to a large and missing topic just as User:BetterVotingAdvocacy added Condorcet to the gov formation page. My edit to the main page actually sparked a rephrasing of the whole page. This was my understanding of how wikipages should work. If you do not think my edits on electowiki are generally useful I will stop making them. --Dr. Edmonds (talk) 05:09, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

I've long suspected that you had little respect for me. By reading about your belief that I have "an overinflated sense of self importance", it seems my hunch was correct. I suspect you don't care about my opinion, given the number of assumptions you make about me and what I hope to achieve with Electowiki without asking a single question in your 400+ word essay above. I don't have any further questions for you at this time. -- RobLa (talk) 23:53, 30 March 2020 (UTC)