[Election-Methods] Wikimedia adopts the Schulze method

[rob brown]

Pretty cool.

I was curious how my condorcet bar chart thing worked on the results:

http://karmatics.com/voting/bars.html

Unfortunately that many candidates doesn't fit very well on a smaller
monitor, I'm sure I could tweak it to display more compactly, but in the
meantime here is a scaled down image that might be easier to look at:

http://karmatics.com/voting/matrixbars.png

I'm pretty pleased with how well it communicates the way the election
went....just sorting them by rank and using the coloring to show how strong
each pairwise win is helps a lot....but I am big on actually having scores
and bar charts.  (I've made the case here before that if you don't have
"grokkable" output of results, I don't think you'll ever sell a new method
to the world)

The way it actually calculates the scores is rather weird (it is iterative
and converges on a result), but I am sure there is a way to do it that is
non-iterative and will always produce the identical result as the Schulze
method while also producing meaningful and relatively stable scores.  There
is no easy way to define exactly what the scores represent, but there are
some obvious intuitive properties that are desirable....for instance, you
would expect that if only a few ballots added or changed could change the
rank of two or more candidates, their scores should be close together.  I
think the algorithm I used does this quite well.

-rob

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 4:45 PM, Markus Schulze <
markus.schulze at alumni.tu-berlin.de> wrote:

> Hallo,
>
> in May 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation adopted
> the Schulze method, a Condorcet method, for
> the elections of its Board of Trustees:
>
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-May/043134.html
>
> In June 2008, Wikimedia used the Schulze method for
> Wikimedia's very first time:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-05-26/Board_elections
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Results
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-June/044361.html
>
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