[Election-Methods] RE : Re: peer-reviewed work that is critical of IRV

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

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.)