At 01:16 PM 9/28/2007, Kevin Venzke wrote: >I am aware that "Voting matters" has some peer review, but I also have >the impression that it isn't considered very authoritative.
First things first, Kevin. They will strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, you have already seen that. If it is a peer-reviewed publication, it has sufficient cachet to be used as a source. That does not eliminate the possibility of charges of error or bias or whatever, obviously, but if you properly frame the reference, it should survive, legitimately. >If that were shown to be incorrect, though, then at least James >Green-Armytage's article could be usefully cited on this topic. I don't >think he mentions IRV specifically, but he discusses issues that are >of interest to e.g. Condorcet advocates. > >I'm not eager to resort to citing (former) EM list subscribers though. Green-Armytage is cited in places as an authority; however, note that he is self-published and could be challenged on that basis. Wikipedia has a basic rule: no rules. It's important to understand! There are *guidelines*, but when push comes to shove, adminstrators do pretty much as they see fit, and Wikipedia explicitly denies any responsibility to follow any specific set of rules. But there are a lot of "guidelines," and there may be some hope of getting some of them enforced and followed. We can ask for arbitration, if we get into a genuine edit war, but what I've seen is that arbiters sometimes make snap judgements, not really knowing what they are doing or the real issues. The best protection is a community of users who understand Wikipedia "rules" and who stand up for the article being neutral *and* informative. And that is exactly what Wikipedia wants us to develop. They really don't want to be our babysitters. So: how could we determine a true consensus of election methods experts, or something even broader than that? Hint: Mr. Green-Armytage is one of the co-inventors of what might pull it off, though he mostly focused on it as an election method, whereas my own primary interest has been in NGO, peer-association structure. I've been thinking for some time that we should form an Election Methods Free Association, or Interest Group, and set it up as an FA/DP organization. The DP part of it allows *wide* participation -- if you could get election methods experts to join -- and efficiency -- most of them wouldn't have to actively participate but could essentially vet someone to vote for them, subject, of course, to their review, as any good DP system will do if the client wants to monitor the actions of the proxy. The FA would not issue statements like "Election Methods Experts Reject IRV." That would be contrary to FA traditions. Rather, what we would see would be something like "97% of election methods experts, qualified according to the peer-qualification rules of the Accreditation Caucus, rejected IRV as an election reform, and of the general interest group membership, the vote was 83% in the same direction. The majority and minority reports, including all received comments and poll results, are at [URL]." This, issued officially by the designated secretary of the Association, is merely a fact, reported by an expert on the fact: the percentage of vote. It would be a primary source for Wikipedia, again, if it were properly framed. It would actually be a better source, if it truly had broad membership, than any individual peer-reviewed journal. It's easy to knock over a single editorial board, sometimes. Pretty hard to knock over a consensus of experts in a field. Trick is to measure that. And the "general interest group membership" would be open to anyone who declares interest.... if necessary, there are measures that could be taken to deal with sock puppets and selective soliciation of membership.... By the way, I shouldn't have to be the only one complaining about massive reverts to the IRV article! Further, if I revert them back myself, I risk getting banned myself. Though someone would, by policy, have to warn me first. So cooperation in reverting the gratutitous and undiscussed edits by FairVote meat puppets would be helpful. (Though if it is the grand panjandrum himself, technically, it's not a "meat puppet," it's possibly a "sock puppet" if he is using more than one account.) ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
