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

[Closed Limelike Curves]

Stemming hasn't been a thing for a very long time now, so a modern search
engine shouldn't have issues identifying "Instant-runoff" and "Alternative
vote" as synonyms. (In fact, what you say suggests Wikipedia doesn't follow
redirects, because the page you found is Instant-runoff voting and not the
Alternative vote redirect.)

I suspect the articles "Ranked voting" and "Ranked-choice voting in the
United States" are interfering with the search somehow, by making it seem
like there are other Wikipedia articles more closely related to the topic
than the instant-runoff voting article.

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 3:19 PM Closed Limelike Curves <
closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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