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

[Closed Limelike Curves]

That was my first guess a couple months ago, but "Ranked-choice voting" is
a redirect to Instant-runoff and has been for a long time (I wouldn't have
changed the title without trying that first, since I fully agree that IRV
is a better descriptive term.)

I'd also note this is less about exposure than it is just about helping
people find what they need. People who Google "ranked choice voting" are
probably looking for IRV. (Otherwise, why not search "ranked voting"?) Most
of them have no idea that the magic keyword to learn more about RCV is to
search for IRV.

I suspect the reason Google has trouble recognizing these as synonyms is
because there are different articles for "ranked voting", "ranked choice
voting in the United States", and "instant-runoff". Of those, the first two
are more likely to show up as the most relevant Wiki pages according to
Google's algorithm than the "Instant-runoff voting" page is. Which also
explains why the ranked voting link is so far down the results—most people
don't find that page helpful, so they don't click on it. (And nobody would
click the IRV page because it's not obviously related to RCV from the
title.)

I know Google doesn't always show Wikipedia articles first on, but the IRV
article doesn't show in the results at all, despite being the most relevant
search result for most people.

On Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 12:36 PM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km-elmet at munsterhjelm.no> wrote:

> On 2024-10-23 18:38, Closed Limelike Curves wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Apparently I expressed myself in a muddled way. That was not my point;
> let's try again.
>
> What I am suggesting is that:
>         1. Google does not automatically list the Wikipedia page for X as
> the
> first entry for search term X,
> and
>         2. Google may follow redirects so that if you search for X, and
> the
> Wikipedia page for X redirects to Y, you will get Y as the first
> Wikipedia result.
>
> Point one, if true, means that one can't conclude that relabeling
> "instant-runoff voting" to "ranked choice voting" would push the
> Wikipedia page above the Fairvote, etc. pages as a natural consequence.
>
> Point two, if true, means that you do not need to explicitly move
> "instant-runoff voting" to "ranked choice voting" to get the benefits of
> Google exposure; just making "ranked choice voting" a redirect to
> "instant-runoff voting" will give you the same Google benefit when
> Google updates its index to reflect the change.
>
> If both are true, it indicates that we can't reject the hypothesis that
> there would be no particular benefit to renaming the instant-runoff
> voting article to "ranked choice voting", at least not as far as Google
> indexing effects are concerned.
>
>
> My evidence for number one is that there are plenty of search terms that
> you can search for that does not return its Wikipedia article as the
> first match. In retrospect, it's kind of obvious. For instance, you can
> search for, I don't know, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service", and the
> IMDB page, not the Wikipedia article, will be the first match on Google.
>
> My evidence for number two is that searching for terms that are similar
> to the target term often give the target term as the first Wikipedia
> article. Let's go through the examples I provided.
>
> a. "Set covering" leads to "set cover problem", i.e. returns the
> Wikipedia article on the latter as its first Wikipedia match. You
> suggested that this is just Google doing fuzzy matching and thus
> changing "set covering" to "set cover problem" internally. Okay, let's
> suppose for the time being that that is true.
>
> b. "Alternative vote" leads to "instant-runoff voting". Again you
> suggest that Google is just doing some kind of synonym parsing, and that
> it's not actually following redirects; and as evidence, you state that
> if Google were following redirects, it should have returned the redirect
> instead of the instant-runoff voting article as its first Wikipedia match.
>
> But here I was apparently a bit unclear, because I didn't mean to say
> that Google would index redirects. Instead, I was saying that it would
> follow them transparently, much like a HTTP redirect. The expected
> behavior would then be that the crawler finds "alternative vote", makes
> a note that this redirects to "instant-runoff voting", and thus, follow
> the redirect and index "instant-runoff voting" for the search term
> "alternative vote".
>
> This is consistent with its actual behavior: going to the alternative
> vote page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_vote?redirect=no,
> shows that it's a redirect to the IRV page. Furthermore, searching for
> "alternative vote" returns, at least to me, the instant-runoff voting
> page as the first Wikipedia result.
>
> c. "Top-two runoff" leads to "two-round system". This would also seem to
> suggest that Google follows redirects, since
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-two_runoff?redirect=no is a redirect
> to the "Two-round system" page; that either Google follows redirects or
> that its synonym handling or aliasing system in practice produces the
> same effect.
>
> Now, you seem to suggest the latter, that due to its synonym handling,
> Google should '[have no] issues identifying "Instant-runoff" and
> "Alternative vote" as synonyms'.
>
> However: if it has no problem identifying these as synonyms (whether it
> is by following redirect links or by some other means), then it
> shouldn't have a problem identifying "instant-runoff voting" and
> "ranked-choice voting" as synonyms, either.
>
> If Google already identifies instant-runoff voting and ranked choice
> voting as synonyms, then there's little point in relabeling the page to
> make it visible to Google, because it already *is* visible to Google.
> And if it doesn't, then one has to come up with a more complex theory
> that would explain why Google has no problem identifying IRV and AV as
> synonyms and no problem identifying top-two and two-round as synonyms,
> but would have a problem identifying IRV and RCV as synonyms.
>
> -km
>
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