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

[Closed Limelike Curves]

I'm surprised that's your first result;  I'm guessing it's a country thing?
That article is around 5th place for me, after 3 RCV advocacy groups and
Ballotpedia.

"Set covering" is going to go straight to "Set cover problem" because the
words are very similar; the search term doesn't need to match the title
perfectly. Tokenized, these terms are going to look like "x y z" and "x y
w", where z has very little semantic content, so they're basically the same
phrases already. On the other hand, "Ranked-choice voting" and
"Instant-runoff voting" are very different search terms.

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 3:08 PM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km-elmet at munsterhjelm.no> wrote:

> On 2024-10-21 20:11, Closed Limelike Curves wrote:
> > Hi—I definitely agree with this! It's a very problematic misnomer. If I
> > could press a button that deleted the term "Ranked-choice voting" from
> > English and replaced it with "Instant-runoff voting", I 100% would.
> >
> > However, the issue is that's not the choice we have available. When
> > Wikipedia chooses a title, the most important effect this has is on
> > Google and Wikipedia searches for that term. Usually, the top result for
> > "XYZ" on Google is the Wikipedia article titled "XYZ". That's not the
> > case for "Ranked-choice voting", because there isn't a Wikipedia article
> > titled "Ranked-choice voting". Instead, the top result is FairVote's
> > website, which defines RCV as a synonym for IRV in the first line, then
> > provides zero indication that other ranked voting systems exist.
>
> It does seem that Google follows redirects, too. For instance, the WP
> article for "Set covering" redirects to the "Set cover problem".
> Searching Google for "set covering" gives the WP article on the "set
> cover problem" as the first match.
>
> So if the WP instant-runoff article is not the first match, it may not
> simply be "because the WP RCV article is a redirect and Google doesn't
> follow redirects". There may be some other reason.
>
> (For what it's worth, my Google search for "ranked choice voting" gave
> the Wikipedia article for "ranked voting", not the FairVote page, as its
> first match.)
>
> -km
>
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