Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Social choice and voting systems

My work, and more examples

First, I would really like some feedback on the single-winner systems. Do you feel that the pages are better now after the work I've been doing on them? Are they accurate? Thorough? Understandable to people without a background in the subject?

Second, I want to create more examples, that, similar to the one Rob used, help demonstrate tactical voting behavior, and highlight differences between systems. It would be my preference if, like the Tennesee example, this one gave a rationale for the voters' preferences.

For the runoff pages (Instant-runoff voting and runoff voting), I would like to introduce an example like so:

41% A > B > C
20% B > A > C
10% B > C > A
29% C > B > A

In this example, there is an incentive for a few voters from A to falsely put C at the tops of their ballots, lifting C into the final runoff, where it will lose to A. Does anybody know a made-up but plausible or historical example where this could or did happen? I think the made-up examples without any reasoning really fall flat.

DanKeshet

Praise and suggestions

Slowly, but surely, I feel like this area of wikipedia has started to become very useful. I believe that it is currently the second-best all-around resource on voting systems on the web, behind the ACE Project, which is quite excellent. (And, of coure, there are tons of pages on individual systems or criteria that are much better.) Google searching finds that outside people are starting to link to Voting system as well as Duverger's Law and Condorcet's method, especially on Usenet, but also on the WWW.

So, I'd like to suggest two quick campaigns to improve the project:

• Images! I think the Image:Sample-nz-ballot-small.jpg complements the written explanation very well. If anybody has pictures of real ballots of different kinds of elections, I think that would be a really great addition.

• A thorough review of 142's contributions. Particularly: disapproval voting, tolerances versus preferences and the many links to these two in other articles. I have previously had these pages deleted, because I believed they were incomprehensible, though seeded with facts. (142 then rewrote them.) It's mentally grueling to be in an edit war on this alone, so I would feel much better if a few of us got together and either edited them or decided they were unworthy of editing and agreed to delete them and keep them deleted.

DanKeshet

I don't think they should be deleted. Pages with those titles should exist, and they are probably not the worst pages on wikipedia. Besides, deleting them would just be picking a fight. Rewrites would be cool, but I don't care enough about those two topics to try and help there (I'm more of a maintainer than a creator of wikipedia content, coming up with lots of new words in a row is hard work). I agree about the exessive inbound links, and have moved or removed a couple of them.

pm67nz

Images! You are so right, Dan. I hope it doesn't break local laws to take pictures of ballot papers! :) I'll see what I can find.

Regards 142 - I'll take a look at the two articles you mention for starters, certainly. If I recall, they're biased, but just about better than nothing at all - so hopefully we can tweak rather than delete. Martin 18:23, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Hi Dan -- Sorry for taking so long to respond. I agree fully with pm67nz. As long as the excessive inbound links get curbed, this seems fine. -- RobLa 08:02, 28 Oct 2003 (UTC)

My vision

Let me make my vision clear here: I want to produce occasional WikiReaders out of all these articles using the wiki-to-pdf script. It would open with Voting system, then move on to the criteria and theory, the systems themselves, the theorists, the electoral reform organizations, et cetera. In all, it would probably be about 50 pages printed. We could distribute it to voting reform groups, and they could adapt it for their purposes. For example, I could imagine an "electoral reform" caucus within a political party distribute a selected set of articles to convention delegates as a way of informing them of their options when it comes time to vote on a platform or on a reform proposal. Alternately, these could empower smaller electoral reform groups (small town reformers, say) to have correct, NPOV information on the different systems to distribute. Cool? DanKeshet 06:26, Apr 23, 2004 (UTC)

Nevermind, the image and table parts of wiki2pdf aren't working yet. When they are, it should facilitate easy creations of such a reader. DanKeshet 19:43, Apr 24, 2004 (UTC)

Adjustment suggestion

As you are more familiar with voting pages structure, I suggest you take look and merge/move/list those pages where it is appopriate: Vote Simple Majority Voting Qualified Majority Voting --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 17:36, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Voting Requirements FLVS

this article is up for deletion: Voting Requirements FLVS