[EM] Countering FairVote propaganda on Wikipedia

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 2024-03-16 20:45, Closed Limelike Curves wrote:
> If y'all want to understand why FairVote has been so successful, the 
> most widely-read Wikipedia pages on voting systems+theory are all 
> extremely soft on IRV/Hare for a system with so many pathologies.

I haven't had much time to dedicate to Wikipedia of late, but here are 
some comments and ideas about how the examples could be corrected.

> 
>  1. "Comparison of electoral systems" is a complete mess. ~0 help to
>     anyone who wants to understand which systems are better or worse.

The problem is that we can't have all of the criteria at once. That 
doesn't mean that every method is equally good, but if the table is 
meant to give an indication of which methods are better than others, it 
would have to be reorganized.

I'm not sure how though? We could argue that elections with Condorcet 
cycles are rare and thus Condorcet is important. Or reorder the columns 
by how much Wikipedia traffic their respective articles get as a proxy 
of how serious/interesting people think the criteria are?

Or have a section with arguments about what criteria are important. 
IRVists would probably say LNH. Condorcet proponents would say 
Condorcet. rb-j would say summability, approval and cardinal guys would 
say weak FBC.

Maybe people can agree that clone independence is pretty important. 
There might be a room for more general strategic nomination incentive, 
too, and then we could link to Green-Armytage's results showing IRV to 
have significant exit incentive despite its clone independence.

>  2. Tables, charts, etc. provide information overload with tons of
>     columns but ~0 information on how common these failures are. Most
>     people would think twice about Hare if they knew it has /even/
>     /more/ pathologies than FPP (under impartial culture, when counting
>     monotonicity and participation failures).

Ideally, we'd pick some sensible default ballot distribution and then 
give information about how often failures occur. Impartial culture is a 
useful "worst case" or pessimist distribution: if things can go wrong, 
they likely will go wrong in IC, but it should be clear that that's what 
it's used as a proxy for.

Spatial distributions are more realistic.

Then we could run simulators to get the failure probabilities and report 
them. But as Wikipedia is not a place for OR, we would have to get them 
published elsewhere first.

>  3. The "Criticism" section under IRV has zero criticism except from
>     right-wing nutjobs saying it's a way to rig elections. None of the
>     major problems with IRV (monotonicity, frequent spoiler effects) are
>     mentioned in the lead at all.

That ought to be the easiest one to fix. Make a reference to center 
squeeze (see my reply to rb-j), one to monotonicity (IIRC there are 
already references to sources about IRV nonmonotonicity), and one to 
general exit incentive as indicating spoiler effects.

-km