[EM] "Instant-runoff voting" article renamed to "Ranked-choice voting" on English Wikipedia

[Closed Limelike Curves]

But, in any case, my main comments on this are that Wikipedia policy is
actually very clear on this issue.
1. Wikipedia requires using the common name for a thing, even if it's a
misnomer or less-than-ideal. For example, the articles are titled "morning
sickness" and "Panama hat" instead of "Nausea and vomiting of pregnancy" or
"That hat from Ecuador sometimes called a Panama hat". This helps both with
search results and with ensuring neutrality in naming disputes: the San
Francisco Board of Elections would argue "RCV" is accurate because voters
do rank the candidates, but that "IRV" is inaccurate because the results
aren't instantly available.
2. Wikipedia requires following the lead of a majority of reliable sources.
Overwhelmingly, reliable sources (e.g. media, academic papers, and so on)
use and explicitly define RCV to mean IRV, not ranked voting methods in
general.

On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 10:05 AM Closed Limelike Curves <
closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Electowiki article covers this. The name IRV is a promotional name
> pushed by FairVote in the early 2000s. The name never really caught on and
> was never used by anyone but FairVote and Wikipedia, because the first
> place to adopt it (San Francisco) renamed it "Ranked-choice voting" because
> they thought the name IRV would confuse people into expecting the results
> to be released "instantly" (immediately after polls closed). The term IRV
> has never seen much widespread use outside voting theory circles and
> FairVote.
>
> On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 9:09 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
> km-elmet at munsterhjelm.no> wrote:
>
>> On 2024-10-18 17:38, Chris Benham wrote:
>> >
>> > I gather that "Instant Runoff Voting" was originally a promotional name
>> > in the US that after being used for a long time was changed (for some
>> > reason I forget) to Ranked Choice Voting.
>>
>>  From what I understand, one of the public-facing organizations (might
>> have been the LWV) suggested the name because, to the voter, the
>> characteristic feature is that you rank the candidates. And then
>> FairVote found out that it helped their advocacy, so it stuck.
>>
>> -km
>> ----
>> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
>> info
>>
>
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