User talk:RobLa/Condorcet

Resuming discussion

Rob – is this the right place for further discussion?

You don’t say what you object to in my changes to the Copeland’s method article, which makes it hard to respond. You find them variously confusing, subjective and problematic, but I don’t consider them confusing or problematic and try to avoid being subjective. There are a few additions near the beginning where I wanted to try out the effect of discussing the Copeland and Condorcet methods together, and I agree that these should be reverted if the articles aren’t merged. Apart from that everything I added seems to me to be true and useful. Very little of it is historical. Expanding 2 articles (Copeland and Condorcet) into 3 (these two plus ‘pairwise voting’) seems a step in the wrong direction. I added a brief mention of why Copeland’s method is more consensual than IRV (which of course applies to any Condorcet method) and browsing the history of the article I think I saw that a similar explanation had been present 15 years ago and then deleted. Maybe you didn’t like it then either.

Coming to the voting articles as a layman, I was conscious of the defects in established methods and was looking for knowledge of what was better, and I was generally disappointed. The articles tell the reader almost nothing he needs to know to recognise that a method is good or bad. An example is the Kemeny-Young article. This method has a very precise rationale, based on the model of a panel of independent experts, which is as mathematically rigorous as it is practically useless; but the rationale isn’t mentioned and the article concentrates on the mechanics of the calculation. The reader has no idea whether the calculation is worth performing or not.

Inevitably, since nothing is said about the rationales of systems, the reader is left staring at the big comparison table (which is the worst possible way of making a decision); the table indicates a preference for Schulze’s method; and the reader turns to another article with no rationale and a mass of graph-theoretical mechanics (albeit visually appealing). He shrugs his shoulders and loses interest.

But anyway, thanks for your patience, and I’m sorry to impose on it further. I think if you dislike my additions to the Copeland article, and prefer an old version which I find very unhelpful, you need to be more specific about its faults. In one of the talk pages a few years ago, Markus Schulze was a little dismissive of Copeland’s method partly on the grounds that its article (the version you want to revert to) was a mere stub. Colin.champion (talk) 08:27, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed reply, User:Colin.champion. I mean that. One of these days I'll have to ask you about Keynesian economics, because I'm guessing that you know more about it than I do. I've merely been reading Paul Krugman's books since the early 1990s, so I probably have all sorts of misconceptions.

One thing I've been studying since the mid-1990s is electoral reform. Ever since my representative to the United States House of Representatives was defeated by Rick White in 1994. She's doing alright these days, but that got me thinking about the changes needed to the electoral systems in the United States. That eventually led me to write an article for The Perl Journal, where I made all sorts of rookie assumptions.

I agree with what you implied in your comments in the Talk:Condorcet method#Scope of this article comments; both the Condorcet method and the Copeland's method articles are a mess. I'd go further and assert that many (most?) articles in Category:Voting systems Category:Electoral systems are a mess. Most articles written by people in the Wikipedia:WikiProject Voting systems project are a mess. Even the name "voting system" is incredibly dubious. We should call them "electoral systems" everywhere, and the WikiProject about them (Wikipedia:WikiProject Voting systems) should probably be renamed "WikiProject Electoral systems". As Napoleon learned the hard way, we all need to choose our battles wisely.

Neither editing Wikipedia nor studying electoral systems is my profession, and I'm learning more-and-more about both every day. One resource I can (sorta) recommend if you want to learn more about election methods is "electowiki.org". electowiki.org is a domain name that I own for a wiki that's hosted in the United Kingdom. There are many articles on electowiki that are copied off of English Wikipedia. The wiki itself is as much of a mess as Category:Electoral systems on this wiki. But I still recommend it because it's my baby.

Regardless, the electoral system-articles tend to be edited by people with massive conflicts of interest, though in most cases, I think they're disclosed. User:MarkusSchulze did a lot of editing on the Schulze method article.. User:VoteFair has done a lot of editing on the Kemeny–Young method article (or the "VoteFair popularity ranking" article, some might prefer). They're all Condorcet derivatives (or should I say Llull derivatives). A lot of confusion about election methods has been the desire for so many people to get their names attached to the method. I've come to understand these methods in part by understanding the people involved. There is a lot of work to be done (both on electowiki, and on English Wikipedia). Could you join Wikipedia:WikiProject Voting systems, and drop a note on the Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Voting systems when you want to make a big change? My suggestions were made because you seemed to be moving pretty quickly to change the Copeland's method article (which does need a lot of work, like the big comparison table can probably be removed, because the comparison table should go in an article dedicated to comparing election methods). Like I said, there's many battles to choose, so please choose wisely. -- RobLa (talk) 09:51, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your very courteous reply. I’m not in any hurry. The only reason I intended to move quickly is that I’d made quite a lot of changes, justifying them in talk pages, and received no response; and I’d got the impression that the project was in hibernation. I would much to prefer to move with consensus if there’s anyone to consense with. Colin.champion (talk) 10:11, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

To Colin.champion: There are a few of us election-method experts on Wikipedia. But others were booted off because they were not diplomatic. Others of us have gotten our hands slapped by Wikipedia editors who don't understand the subject, so we choose our battles carefully. My latest effort was to create an article named "pairwise vote counting" but it involved a split that was denied because the editors fail to understand that pairwise vote counting is used by non-Condorcet methods in addition to Condorcet methods. I've tried to directly convey these concepts to Wikipedia editors, but with no success. Sigh. VoteFair (talk) 05:20, 9 April 2021 (UTC)