Re: [EM] Wikipedia article needs editing
Abd ~ Thank you for warning us about this Wikipedia article (Electoral reform in the United States) being a battleground partly populated with IRV-FairVote soldiers. I'm choosing other fronts for my election-method reform efforts, which is why I don't have time for these edits. Richard Fobes (aka VoteFair) On 8/28/2013 4:22 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 05:12 PM 8/28/2013, Richard Fobes wrote: The Wikipedia article titled Electoral reform in the United States contains a heading Electoral Reform Proposals and then under that heading is a section titled Instant-runoff voting. Obviously this needs to be broadened to Election-method reform with IRV being just one kind of election-method reform. Does anyone have time to do this edit? (I don't.) If one doesn't know Wikipedia policy, it can be an exercise in massive waste of time, or it might be useful for a time, and it's quite unreliable. Basically, that there is what we might consider important information, even information that, among the informed, is obvious and generally accepted, is not enough for Wikipedia, by policy. Indeed, making up an article out of your own knowledge or conclusions is called Original Research, quicklink WP:OR, and is prohibited. Everything should come from Reliable Sources, but don't copy, except for short excerpts, explicitly quoted, and attributed. Reliable Source does not have the ordinary meaning, it is a Wikipedia term of art. It means something independently published, and not self-pubished by an author or advocacy organization or even certain kinds of special-interest groups. Gaming the Vote, Poundstone, is RS. A page on the rangevoting.org web site is not. Never cite anything to a mailing list!!! And, then, if someone reverts you, don't revert war, it can get you blocked quickly. Don't use the Talk page to discuss the subject, but only for evaluating suggested edits. Yeah, counter-intuitive, all right! The cited article is atrocious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform_in_the_United_States#Cost_of_problems_with_the_current_system is one section. It's recentism. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and is to be written, by policy, from an encyclopedic point of view. Everything in the article is about recent situations or proposals or organizations. There is less reliable source on this than on past reform movements. The article appears to be written from a reformer point of view, very possibly someone affiliated with FairVote. The history of the article shows extensive editing by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DavidMCEddy. This user is not exactly a single-purpose account (WP:SPA), but close, he's a reformer, writing about election reform. He uses what appear to be self-published sources, including FairVote. First step would be to take the article down to what is reliably sourced. Much of the article looks like Original Research. A chart showing the advocacy positions of organizations is close to OR. Is that a reliable compilation? What were the standards for inclusion? By the way, the first editor who edited the Talk page, and who worked on the article, was Captain Zyrain. CZ was, at that time or thereabouts, a FairVote activist, and was, he later told me, sent by FairVote to take me out. Unfortunately, he engaged in a conversation and said, essentially, OMG, I've been on the wrong side. He was subsequently, under a different name, banned. The article had a POV tag on it for years. That was removed by DavidMCEddy unilaterally. That's not a violation of policy, but he removed it first and asked questions later In his discussion of the article, he appears to have had the intention of removing the appearance that the article was a sales pitch for Instant Runoff Voting. Indeed. But he's not a sophisticated editor. McEddy makes piles of small edits, also a sign of an inexperienced editor. Yes, one should not make one huge edit, that is also rude. But section rewrites should be done with a single edit, proofread before saving The POV tag was added by Devourer09. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Electoral_reform_in_the_United_Statesdiff=455307060oldid=455302714 This editor had five edits this year, so far, probably is not checking his/her watchlist. Recent edits: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Electoral_reform_in_the_United_Statesdiff=570492529oldid=570491180 though it appears to be a sound edit, elimination possibly POV language, was reverted by a power user, an administrator, to revert block evasion. That's standard practice if an editor is identified as evading a block, to revert their contributions without considering them. Anyone could revert that back. If they dare. I don't know that any serious POV pusher is watching this article. That reversion is odd. The IP was not blocked, there is no block log for it. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidentsoldid=570593657#Harassing_an_administrator.3F Arthur
Re: [EM] Wikipedia article needs editing
At 02:56 PM 8/30/2013, Richard Fobes wrote: Abd ~ Thank you for warning us about this Wikipedia article (Electoral reform in the United States) being a battleground partly populated with IRV-FairVote soldiers. I'm choosing other fronts for my election-method reform efforts, which is why I don't have time for these edits. Richard Fobes (aka VoteFair) Well, the article was most recently heavily edited by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DavidMCEddy This editor does not appear to me to be a FairVote soldier, but only an ordinary editor, not terribly sophisticated as to Wikipedia RS requirements, just trying to make the article more complete and to improve it in certain ways. Rather, early editing on the article was done by someone who actually was a FairVote solider. Or who became one for a time. I don't see the article as a true battleground yet. It has not attracted enough attention. Mostly it's been neglected. My *general conclusion* about Wikipedia is that editing it can be far, far too cumbersome, and the results are unstable, whenever battleground conditions arise. One can go to enormous lengths to develop editorial consensus. Look back a few years later, and the results may have disappeared, with old, already resolved issues, being asserted again. I could show examples from the Instant Runoff Voting article. I'll provide a clue. In theory, there should be no references in the lede of the article, which briefly explains the topic and *what is not controversial about it.* But when an article becomes a battleground, a faction will want to assert its position in the lede, and then may be challenged, and so references are added. But that misses the point. To put something in the lede is not just about truth, or verifiability, but rather establishes the context in which the article will be read. A POV faction will cherry-pick the available facts to assert them in the lede. Perhaps only positive or negative facts will be so asserted. From the current lede for the IRV article, you would have no clue that there is any controversy over it. There is only promotional information. I notice that FairVote is still cited as if FairVote were Reliable Source. By definition, it is not. It's an advocacy organization. At one point, all this was cleaned out. FairVote was listed as an advocacy organization. That's been removed, because it's listed as if it were a reliable source, and it is generally not done to add additional links to reliable sources, i.e., to sites already referenced in the article. Everything in the lede should be covered in the article, and that is where references would be (or sometimes, a partiuclar point is covered in another article, which will be cited in the main body of the article, and references might be there. Again, such a summary should reflect high consensus. User RRichie continues to edit the article. Rob's edits are often helpful, but he has a consistent point of view. (He was actually blocked at one point, for behavior violating policy, while editing anonymously. I confronted that, it was my first experience with enforcing Wikipedia policy. I also supported his unblocking, provided he edited open with disclosed conflict of interest. The same with our friend from Vermont, Terry Bouricius. He'd also been blocked because he'd been supporting the anonymous Richie and a sock puppet of another banned editor. I became much more involved in Wikipedia policy in general, and moved away from tending the IRV article. There has been, perhaps, a little slippage on the matter of IRV and Robert's Rules of Order. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Robert.27s_Rules_of_Order Originally, Robert's Rules was listed in the lede as recommending IRV. I added to that the rather negative comments in RRONR about the method. It is suggested only as an option, based on actual practice, not as a normative suggestion. And the method they actually describe is critically different from what is implemented on FairVote recommendations. I requires a true majority for election, not the faux last round majority. FairVote argued bitterly against this. I was called a liar, even though it was blatantly clear from RRONR. Now, with my later perspective, with much more experience with Wikipedia policy, I was doing a kind of Original Research. That is sometimes allowed, and so, about this point, maybe. In the end, it would depend on editorial consensus, but if only one faction is paying attention to an article, there you go! I see it all the time: a faction slips in an edit and nobody notices. I've seen totally outrageous edits, seriously violating policy, slipped in, nobody noticed, and even when the editor is banned, nobody does anything about it, because it simply isn't realized the implications of the edit. Only someone who is aware of the various POVs and how they are pushed will notice it. Notice the
Re: [EM] Wikipedia article needs editing
On 08/28/2013 11:12 PM, Richard Fobes wrote: The Wikipedia article titled Electoral reform in the United States contains a heading Electoral Reform Proposals and then under that heading is a section titled Instant-runoff voting. Obviously this needs to be broadened to Election-method reform with IRV being just one kind of election-method reform. Does anyone have time to do this edit? (I don't.) I have quite a few real world issues to deal with right now, but I could give some ideas that come to mind if others would like to edit it. One could mention Condorcet, particularly Schulze, as being used in different private organizations (usually of the technical variety), as a more concrete type of electoral reform: the voting method is seen as a tool, and the organizations reach for the tool known to them. Then one could give a reference to Toby Nixon - or maybe not, since he wasn't reelected. Finally, there would definitely be room for a mention of the CES and of Approval voting advocacy organizations (and possibly also CRV). Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Wikipedia article needs editing
At 05:12 PM 8/28/2013, Richard Fobes wrote: The Wikipedia article titled Electoral reform in the United States contains a heading Electoral Reform Proposals and then under that heading is a section titled Instant-runoff voting. Obviously this needs to be broadened to Election-method reform with IRV being just one kind of election-method reform. Does anyone have time to do this edit? (I don't.) If one doesn't know Wikipedia policy, it can be an exercise in massive waste of time, or it might be useful for a time, and it's quite unreliable. Basically, that there is what we might consider important information, even information that, among the informed, is obvious and generally accepted, is not enough for Wikipedia, by policy. Indeed, making up an article out of your own knowledge or conclusions is called Original Research, quicklink WP:OR, and is prohibited. Everything should come from Reliable Sources, but don't copy, except for short excerpts, explicitly quoted, and attributed. Reliable Source does not have the ordinary meaning, it is a Wikipedia term of art. It means something independently published, and not self-pubished by an author or advocacy organization or even certain kinds of special-interest groups. Gaming the Vote, Poundstone, is RS. A page on the rangevoting.org web site is not. Never cite anything to a mailing list!!! And, then, if someone reverts you, don't revert war, it can get you blocked quickly. Don't use the Talk page to discuss the subject, but only for evaluating suggested edits. Yeah, counter-intuitive, all right! The cited article is atrocious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform_in_the_United_States#Cost_of_problems_with_the_current_system is one section. It's recentism. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and is to be written, by policy, from an encyclopedic point of view. Everything in the article is about recent situations or proposals or organizations. There is less reliable source on this than on past reform movements. The article appears to be written from a reformer point of view, very possibly someone affiliated with FairVote. The history of the article shows extensive editing by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DavidMCEddy. This user is not exactly a single-purpose account (WP:SPA), but close, he's a reformer, writing about election reform. He uses what appear to be self-published sources, including FairVote. First step would be to take the article down to what is reliably sourced. Much of the article looks like Original Research. A chart showing the advocacy positions of organizations is close to OR. Is that a reliable compilation? What were the standards for inclusion? By the way, the first editor who edited the Talk page, and who worked on the article, was Captain Zyrain. CZ was, at that time or thereabouts, a FairVote activist, and was, he later told me, sent by FairVote to take me out. Unfortunately, he engaged in a conversation and said, essentially, OMG, I've been on the wrong side. He was subsequently, under a different name, banned. The article had a POV tag on it for years. That was removed by DavidMCEddy unilaterally. That's not a violation of policy, but he removed it first and asked questions later In his discussion of the article, he appears to have had the intention of removing the appearance that the article was a sales pitch for Instant Runoff Voting. Indeed. But he's not a sophisticated editor. McEddy makes piles of small edits, also a sign of an inexperienced editor. Yes, one should not make one huge edit, that is also rude. But section rewrites should be done with a single edit, proofread before saving The POV tag was added by Devourer09. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Electoral_reform_in_the_United_Statesdiff=455307060oldid=455302714 This editor had five edits this year, so far, probably is not checking his/her watchlist. Recent edits: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Electoral_reform_in_the_United_Statesdiff=570492529oldid=570491180 though it appears to be a sound edit, elimination possibly POV language, was reverted by a power user, an administrator, to revert block evasion. That's standard practice if an editor is identified as evading a block, to revert their contributions without considering them. Anyone could revert that back. If they dare. I don't know that any serious POV pusher is watching this article. That reversion is odd. The IP was not blocked, there is no block log for it. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidentsoldid=570593657#Harassing_an_administrator.3F Arthur Rubin reverted this IP on a page not related to any of the reverts of his edits. Fascinating. Rubin maintains a page listing all the incarnations of this IP editor, in his judgment. He's violating common advice to ignore trolls. But this is what I've seen. Blocking an editor becomes a matter of
