Bravo to Jameson & Augustin! Thank you for being willing to do the hard
work of creating an online election-method peer-reviewed publication!
My earlier suggestion to take advantage of the Democracy Chronicles
publication was based on my belief that there might not be enough
participation to overcome the ambitious nature of this project. Now
that the participation barrier has been bridged, I'll offer three
updated suggestions.
First, I suggest that someone write an article for Democracy Chronicles
that invites politically frustrated voters/citizens who have an
education in mathematics to join the project as reviewers (and perhaps
later as contributors). Adrian might be able to write this article and
include quotations from Jameson and myself and others about the need for
this project. For this purpose I'll add some more words (besides those
I've already written about this topic) below.
Second, I suggest that most of the peer-reviewed published articles be
kept short, similar to the length of forum postings. If this is done
then I would be willing to review at least some of them, in the same way
that I now read forum postings. I don't expect to have enough time to
review long articles.
Third, I suggest that reviewers be allowed to write a few words rather
than only being allowed to click a box that says approve or disapprove.
Based on what is written in this forum, I doubt that I would be
willing to unconditionally approve any article. To encourage brevity in
a review, long reviews (say more than 2,000 characters?) could display
only the beginning, and then include a link to the remainder of the review.
Now I'll offer quotations that Adrian might be able to use as parts of
an article about this new publication. I've enclosed in quotation marks
the more obviously subjective statements.
In recent years Wikipedia has become a great place to access information
about science and technology and mathematics. Previously that
information had to be obtained from academic publications where experts
in a field carefully reviewed each academic article to eliminate
subjective (non-scientific) claims. "Unfortunately those academic
publications operate at a slow pace compared to the pace of Wikipedia
edits. The result is that some Wikipedia articles are more up-to-date
than the information in academic publications. This is a wonderful
change except that Wikipedia requires that every possibly-controversial
statement must include an in-line citation to a peer-reviewed published
article."
"This 'verifiability' requirement prevents unsupportable statements,
which accounts for much of Wikipedia's reliability. Unfortunately the
academic publication process moves very slowly in the field of election
methods. The result is frustrating for election-method experts because
we want election-method Wikipedia articles to be up-to-date, but it is
difficult to find peer-reviewed election-method articles that are
up-to-date. This new project of creating an online peer-reviewed
publication will allow us to create expert-reviewed articles that
support up-to-date statements in related Wikipedia articles."
"There is an interesting irony about Wikipedia articles needing to cite
academic publications, while at the same time replacing such
publications as a source of knowledge. The Wikimedia Foundation, which
runs Wikipedia, has adopted a recently developed election method for
electing its Board of Trustees members. Unfortunately that method is a
single-winner method, yet it is being used to fill multiple board-number
seats. Most election-method experts recognize that the results are very
unfair. Yet articles that explain the unfairness cannot be written as
Wikipedia articles because academic publications do not yet address this
unfairness. In turn, academic publications do not cover such topics
because governmental elections are designed by election-method experts
who know enough not to make that kind of mistake."
This last quotation may not belong in this article, but I'll let others
decided its relevance.
"As a related irony, I think the Wikimedia election-method unfairness
may account for why Wikipedia has been losing the subject-matter experts
who write content for the articles, while becoming increasingly
dominated by "editors" who focus on meeting Wikipedia rules. In
particular, the Wikimedia election method makes it possible for 51% of
the voters to completely fill all the board-member seats, without
allowing the other 49% to fill even one seat. The resulting bias has
increased the request for more in-line citations that point to
peer-reviewed publications. Yet with academic publications lagging
behind the knowledge of election-method experts, the needed citations do
not exist. This new project will help to solve this dilemma."
Of course everyone else is welcome to supply Adrian with their own
statements that he can include in an article about the new peer-reviewed
publication.
Again, bravo for taking academic knowledge into the digital age!
Richard Fobes
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