[EM] Wikipedia article needs editing

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 02:56 PM 8/30/2013, Richard Fobes wrote:
>Abd ~
>
>Thank you for warning us about this Wikipedia article ("Electoral 
>reform in the United States") being a battleground partly populated 
>with IRV-FairVote soldiers.
>
>I'm choosing other "fronts" for my election-method reform efforts, 
>which is why I don't have time for these edits.
>
>Richard Fobes
>(aka VoteFair)

Well, the article was most recently heavily edited by 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DavidMCEddy

This editor does not appear to me to be a "FairVote soldier," but 
only an ordinary editor, not terribly sophisticated as to Wikipedia 
RS requirements, just trying to make the article more complete and to 
improve it in certain ways.

Rather, early editing on the article was done by someone who actually 
was a "FairVote solider." Or who became one for a time.

I don't see the article as a true "battleground" yet. It has not 
attracted enough attention. Mostly it's been neglected.

My *general conclusion* about Wikipedia is that editing it can be 
far, far too cumbersome, and the results are unstable, whenever 
"battleground" conditions arise. One can go to enormous lengths to 
develop editorial consensus. Look back a few years later, and the 
results may have disappeared, with old, already resolved issues, 
being asserted again.

I could show examples from the Instant Runoff Voting article. I'll 
provide a clue.

In theory, there should be no references in the lede of the article, 
which briefly explains the topic and *what is not controversial about 
it.* But when an article becomes a battleground, a faction will want 
to assert its position in the lede, and then may be challenged, and 
so references are added. But that misses the point. To put something 
in the lede is not just about "truth," or "verifiability," but rather 
establishes the context in which the article will be read. A POV 
faction will cherry-pick the available facts to assert them in the 
lede. Perhaps only "positive" or "negative" facts will be so asserted.

 From the current lede for the IRV article, you would have no clue 
that there is any controversy over it. There is only promotional 
information. I notice that FairVote is still cited as if FairVote 
were Reliable Source. By definition, it is not. It's an advocacy 
organization. At one point, all this was cleaned out. FairVote was 
listed as an advocacy organization. That's been removed, because it's 
listed as if it were a "reliable source," and it is generally not 
done to add additional links to reliable sources, i.e., to sites 
already referenced in the article.

Everything in the lede should be covered in the article, and that is 
where references would be (or sometimes, a partiuclar point is 
covered in another article, which will be cited in the main body of 
the article, and references might be there. Again, such a summary 
should reflect high consensus.

User RRichie continues to edit the article. Rob's edits are often 
helpful, but he has a consistent point of view. (He was actually 
blocked at one point, for behavior violating policy, while editing 
anonymously. I confronted that, it was my first experience with 
enforcing Wikipedia policy. I also supported his unblocking, provided 
he edited open with disclosed conflict of interest. The same with our 
friend from Vermont, Terry Bouricius. He'd also been blocked because 
he'd been supporting the anonymous Richie and a sock puppet of 
another banned editor.

I became much more involved in Wikipedia policy in general, and moved 
away from tending the IRV article.

There has been, perhaps, a little slippage on the matter of IRV and 
Robert's Rules of Order.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Robert.27s_Rules_of_Order

Originally, Robert's Rules was listed in the lede as recommending 
IRV. I added to that the rather negative comments in RRONR about the 
method. It is suggested only as an option, based on actual practice, 
not as a normative suggestion. And the method they actually describe 
is critically different from what is implemented on FairVote 
recommendations. I requires a true majority for election, not the 
faux "last round majority."

FairVote argued bitterly against this. I was called a liar, even 
though it was blatantly clear from RRONR. Now, with my later 
perspective, with much more experience with Wikipedia policy, I was 
doing a kind of Original Research. That is sometimes allowed, and so, 
about this point, maybe. In the end, it would depend on editorial 
consensus, but if only one faction is paying attention to an article, 
there you go! I see it all the time: a faction slips in an edit and 
nobody notices.

I've seen totally outrageous edits, seriously violating policy, 
slipped in, nobody noticed, and even when the editor is banned, 
nobody does anything about it, because it simply isn't realized the 
implications of the edit. Only someone who is aware of the various 
POVs and how they are pushed will notice it.

Notice the implication from the RRO section: repeated balloting is 
"impractical." Yet the most widely implemented election reform, for 
over a century, has been real runoff voting. It's obviously not 
intrinsically impractical! RRONR points out the serious problems 
raised by IRV, and the RRONR version asserts those *even if a 
majority is required*. They would never recommend the FairVote 
version of IRV, not for single-winner elections.

So the text, "and then the instant runoff voting method is detailed" 
is *wrong.*

That text is an example of synthesis, of the interpretation of a 
source by an editor. Essentially, RRONR does "detail" a method. Is 
that method the same as IRV? It is certainly similar, but there is a 
critical difference. They never redefine "majority," as the IRV 
method as applied under FairVote recommendations does. The RRONR 
description is quite explicit: if there is no majority found, the 
election *fails and must be repeated.* They don't give accepting a 
plurality result as an option, and the definition of majority used by 
FairVote *cannot fail to be found,* because, essentially, all 
contrary votes have been eliminated, excluded from the basis for majority.

This is one way that FairVote has managed to promote deception: they 
have discovered facts, that if alleged, are defensible as true, at 
least in some way. If the fact is alleged, people then make certain 
assumptions. The *counting method* is generally described, and I 
remember how long it took me to notice the actual difference between 
the FairVote method and the RRONR method, so thoroughly had I been 
led -- by the FairVote quoting of that section, which they actually 
do quote -- into thinking that this was "IRV." It is *exactly* the 
method, with only one exception!

A crucial exception, that, if applied to, say, the San Francisco RCV 
elections, would require many of them -- almost everyone where there 
was an "instant runoff -- to be repeated, thus kind of blowing the 
utility of RCV out of the water!

Now, what can be done about this? I don't know. Wikipedia process is 
so cumbersome that no particular approach is reliable. It is often a 
matter of convincing "neutral editors" that a change is okay. The 
problem is that "neutral editors" generally are ignorant on the 
topic, and easily misled. It can be very tricky. Wikipedia is 
"anti-expert." There is something appealing about this, but it also 
leads to serious problems where accurate interpetation of sources is 
involved. Non-experts may easily misunderstand sources!

In this case, a parliamentarian would quickly realize the 
implications of "majority." But most editors aren't parliamentarians!

Here is a remarkable recent edit that can illustrate the problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Instant-runoff_voting&diff=561293057&oldid=560680057

The editor claims, in his edit summary, that

>(There is no such thing as an "absolutely majority" (nor, a 
>correctly spelled "absolute majority"). A majority is defined as 
>more than half.

There was an obvious error there, but in voting system descriptions, 
"absolute majority" refers to "majority of the votes." It's distinct 
from the IRV "last round majority," or the "majority of votes for 
candidates not yet eliminated. In Australia -- and Wikipedia is about 
the world, not just the United States, for sure -- the term "absolute 
majority" is used with the "majority of all the votes" meaning, that 
is, all *legal votes.* Australia requires that, to be a legal vote, 
and in "absolute majority" jurisdictions, the voter rank *all* the 
candidates, so an absolute majority is guaranteed by the rules. In 
some Australian jurisdictions, "OPV," or Optional Preferential 
Voting, is allowed, and the term "absolute majority" is then changed 
to the modified majority that excludes some legal votes as part of the basis.

This editor still left "absolute majority" in the text, a few words 
later. The change was not wrong, but betrays an ignorance of the issues.

The section on IRV procedure is effectively designed to be "true" but 
to suppress recognition of the difference:

>The process repeats until one candidate achieves a majority of votes 
>cast for continuing candidates. Ballots that 'exhaust' all their 
>preferences (all its ranked candidates are eliminated) are set aside.

Notice the inserted phrase "cast for continuing candidates." That 
excludes many votes, such that, *often*, IRV winners don't actually 
have the support of a majority of voters, in spite of major 
propaganda in implementation campaigns that IRV is a way to find such 
majorities. Thet explantion, "set aside," matches the RRONR 
description. Those ballots are literally "set aside" in manual 
counting procedures, i.e., they are no longer counted. But what does 
not change in the RRONR procedure is the definition of majority. It 
was calculated at the beginning, in the first round, and it remains the same.

Most people don't think of or realize the implications of candidate 
elimination. They tend to think very simply, of a situation like Gore 
v. Bush v. Nader. They think of eliminated candidates as minor ones. 
Yet, in fact, IRV can eliminate a candidate who would, in a pairwise 
election, beat every other candidate, but this candidate simply has 
less first-preference votes than two others. Lower-preference votes 
for the candidate may exist, underneath votes for the "top two" as 
identified by IRV. That is, IRV can decide a winner *against* the 
expressed preference of a majority, and it's been known to do that. 
This is why RRONR criticizes IRV, when they refer to a "compromise 
choice." That means a choice that is *actually acceptable to a 
majority of voters.*

Every attempt to explain this in the article was shot down by 
FairVote advocates. It's not that they have the power to control the 
article. It's that they became skilled in presenting misleading arguments.