[EM] Amateur peer-reviewed "journal" for voting methods, criteria, and compliances?

[Richard Fobes]

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