Because there were strong objections from one participant against using average (range) voting, which was already successfully used for our article count reform, for the final voting round on the logos, there is now a FPTP vote in progress on which voting method to use:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_logo_vote/ Vote_on_voting_method
And no, I am not particularly fond of that vote either, but I don't want to be accused of ruthlessly exploiting my position of incredible power as organizer of this world shattering contest to impose upon millions of Wikipedians the voting standard which I prefer, so please do take the opportunity to vote for a mind numbingly complex process that isn't used in any real world election (because people already can't distinguish between the names on their ballot and will certainly not understand the method used to determine a Condorcet winner) if that's what makes you happy. Note, however, that I will not take part in a solution with which I do not agree, so that all blame for the disaster that will inevitably ensue rests solely on the shoulders of the individuals responsible for causing it.
Regards,
Erik
On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:33:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
Because there were strong objections from one participant against using average (range) voting, which was already successfully used for our article count reform, for the final voting round on the logos, there is now a FPTP vote in progress on which voting method to use:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_logo_vote/ Vote_on_voting_method
And no, I am not particularly fond of that vote either, but I don't want to be accused of ruthlessly exploiting my position of incredible power as organizer of this world shattering contest to impose upon millions of Wikipedians the voting standard which I prefer, so please do take the opportunity to vote for a mind numbingly complex process that isn't used in any real world election (because people already can't distinguish between the names on their ballot and will certainly not understand the method used to determine a Condorcet winner) if that's what makes you happy. Note, however, that I will not take part in a solution with which I do not agree, so that all blame for the disaster that will inevitably ensue rests solely on the shoulders of the individuals responsible for causing it.
If you call voting on article count reform "successful" then I don't want to know what would you call "disastrous". And of course Debian, with more voters than Wikipedia, and much more serious elections than just a logo, isn't "real". Condorcet hasn't caused any trouble for Debian, and it assured fair elections without any tactical voting and less prefered outcomes being selected due to peculiarities of voting process.
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Condorcet hasn't caused any trouble for Debian, and it assured fair elections without any tactical voting and less prefered outcomes being selected due to peculiarities of voting process.
I, too, am a fan of Condorcet, despite the complexity. HOWEVER, for the PRESENT election, I would support any sensible and easy method, because it's just a logo, and any of the top competitors are going to be excellent.
Condorcet is sufficiently complex to make voting by hand and tabulating by hand really difficult. But I would support a simple implementation of Condorcet in the software, as I think that Condorcet really is superior to other methods precisely in helping to find a _consensus_, i.e. the avoidance of divisive tactical voting.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com writes:
HOWEVER, for the PRESENT election, I would support any sensible and easy method, because it's just a logo, and any of the top competitors are going to be excellent.
Can someone post a link to this competition, as I can only find the old one.
On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 07:10:04AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Condorcet hasn't caused any trouble for Debian, and it assured fair elections without any tactical voting and less prefered outcomes being selected due to peculiarities of voting process.
I, too, am a fan of Condorcet, despite the complexity. HOWEVER, for the PRESENT election, I would support any sensible and easy method, because it's just a logo, and any of the top competitors are going to be excellent.
Condorcet is sufficiently complex to make voting by hand and tabulating by hand really difficult. But I would support a simple implementation of Condorcet in the software, as I think that Condorcet really is superior to other methods precisely in helping to find a _consensus_, i.e. the avoidance of divisive tactical voting.
There are many simple programs to calculate Condorcet winner, like this one: http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/politics/condorcet-program.html Debian has Condorcet software integrated with GPG-signed voting by mail, but it's a bit too heavy procedure for us.
The "harder" part is a parser for ballots, finding the winner is trivial - just filling NxN table and making a summary of it.
Tomasz-
There are many simple programs to calculate Condorcet winner, like this one: http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/politics/condorcet-program.html
That's exactly the problem -- instead of the voting process being so simple that a six year old could understand it, you now need a program to determine the winner. Voting systems of this complexity are prone to a problem which the geeky voting analysts usually ignore: voter confusion. This confusion in turn can be exploited for a strategy known under the name "bad advice": "If you vote so and so, the Condorcet winner will be FOO. You want FOO to win, don't you?" It can also be used for fraud as fewer people will be able to validate the results, and can lead to voter fatigue, because it leaves many voters unsatisfied as they do not understand why a certain candidate won.
Debian has Condorcet software integrated with GPG-signed voting by mail, but it's a bit too heavy procedure for us.
Nice that even you admit that. Learning from Debian when it comes to usability is never a good idea. Their voting procedure is described this way in their constitution:
- - - 1. Each voter's ballot ranks the options being voted on. Not all options need be ranked. Ranked options are considered preferred to all unranked options. Voters may rank options equally. Unranked options are considered to be ranked equally with one another. Details of how ballots may be filled out will be included in the Call For Votes. 2. If the ballot has a quorum requirement R any options other than the default option which do not receive at least R votes ranking that option above the default option are dropped from consideration. 3. Any (non-default) option which does not defeat the default option by its required majority ratio is dropped from consideration. 1. Given two options A and B, V(A,B) is the number of voters who prefer option A over option B. 2. An option A defeats the default option D by a majority ratio N, if V(A,D) is strictly greater than N * V(D,A). 3. If a supermajority of S:1 is required for A, its majority ratio is S; otherwise, its majority ratio is 1. 4. From the list of undropped options, we generate a list of pairwise defeats. 1. An option A defeats an option B, if V(A,B) is strictly greater than V(B,A). 5. From the list of [undropped] pairwise defeats, we generate a set of transitive defeats. 1. An option A transitively defeats an option C if A defeats C or if there is some other option B where A defeats B AND B transitively defeats C. 6. We construct the Schwartz set from the set of transitive defeats. 1. An option A is in the Schwartz set if for all options B, either A transitively defeats B, or B does not transitively defeat A. 7. If there are defeats between options in the Schwartz set, we drop the weakest such defeats from the list of pairwise defeats, and return to step 5. 1. A defeat (A,X) is weaker than a defeat (B,Y) if V(A,X) is less than V(B,Y). Also, (A,X) is weaker than (B,Y) if V(A,X) is equal to V(B,Y) and V(X,A) is greater than V(Y,B). 2. A weakest defeat is a defeat that has no other defeat weaker than it. There may be more than one such defeat. 8. If there are no defeats within the Schwartz set, then the winner is chosen from the options in the Schwartz set. If there is only one such option, it is the winner. If there are multiple options, the elector with the casting vote chooses which of those options wins.
Note: Options which the voters rank above the default option are options they find acceptable. Options ranked below the default options are options they find unacceptable.
- - -
Now try to explain this procedure to the average American voter. Hilarity and/or violence ensues.
Regards,
Erik
On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 06:28:00PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
Tomasz-
There are many simple programs to calculate Condorcet winner, like this one: http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/politics/condorcet-program.html
That's exactly the problem -- instead of the voting process being so simple that a six year old could understand it, you now need a program to determine the winner. Voting systems of this complexity are prone to a problem which the geeky voting analysts usually ignore: voter confusion. This confusion in turn can be exploited for a strategy known under the name "bad advice": "If you vote so and so, the Condorcet winner will be FOO. You want FOO to win, don't you?" It can also be used for fraud as fewer people will be able to validate the results, and can lead to voter fatigue, because it leaves many voters unsatisfied as they do not understand why a certain candidate won.
Debian has Condorcet software integrated with GPG-signed voting by mail, but it's a bit too heavy procedure for us.
Nice that even you admit that. Learning from Debian when it comes to usability is never a good idea. Their voting procedure is described this way in their constitution:
- Each voter's ballot ranks the options being voted on. Not all
options need be ranked. Ranked options are considered preferred to all unranked options. Voters may rank options equally. Unranked options are considered to be ranked equally with one another. Details of how ballots may be filled out will be included in the Call For Votes. 2. If the ballot has a quorum requirement R any options other than the default option which do not receive at least R votes ranking that option above the default option are dropped from consideration. 3. Any (non-default) option which does not defeat the default option by its required majority ratio is dropped from consideration. 1. Given two options A and B, V(A,B) is the number of voters who prefer option A over option B. 2. An option A defeats the default option D by a majority ratio N, if V(A,D) is strictly greater than N * V(D,A). 3. If a supermajority of S:1 is required for A, its majority ratio is S; otherwise, its majority ratio is 1. 4. From the list of undropped options, we generate a list of pairwise defeats. 1. An option A defeats an option B, if V(A,B) is strictly greater than V(B,A). 5. From the list of [undropped] pairwise defeats, we generate a set of transitive defeats. 1. An option A transitively defeats an option C if A defeats C or if there is some other option B where A defeats B AND B transitively defeats C. 6. We construct the Schwartz set from the set of transitive defeats. 1. An option A is in the Schwartz set if for all options B, either A transitively defeats B, or B does not transitively defeat A. 7. If there are defeats between options in the Schwartz set, we drop the weakest such defeats from the list of pairwise defeats, and return to step 5. 1. A defeat (A,X) is weaker than a defeat (B,Y) if V(A,X) is less than V(B,Y). Also, (A,X) is weaker than (B,Y) if V(A,X) is equal to V(B,Y) and V(X,A) is greater than V(Y,B). 2. A weakest defeat is a defeat that has no other defeat weaker than it. There may be more than one such defeat. 8. If there are no defeats within the Schwartz set, then the winner is chosen from the options in the Schwartz set. If there is only one such option, it is the winner. If there are multiple options, the elector with the casting vote chooses which of those options wins.
Note: Options which the voters rank above the default option are options they find acceptable. Options ranked below the default options are options they find unacceptable.
Now try to explain this procedure to the average American voter. Hilarity and/or violence ensues.
Procedure described in Debian Constitution includes: * quorum * supermajority * default and non-default options * absolute ties (equal number of votes) * and Condorcet's method
Short description: Every voter selects order of preference of candidate options. It's not necessary to rank every option. Options not ranked are considered less preferred than ranked options. Format of the vote should be like: 1 > 5 = 4 > 2 > 3 What means that 1 is the most preferred option, followed by 4 and 5, which are equally preferred, 2 is preferred less than any of 1, 4 and 5, and 3 is the least preferred option (unless there are more than 5 options, in which case they're considered even less preferred than 3).
Option A wins with option B if more voters rank A over B than B over A. If certain option wins with all others, it becomes a winner.
If there is no such option, then the winner is chosen using procedure XYZ.
For some XYZ that really isn't important for average user.
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
I don't want to be accused of ruthlessly exploiting my position of incredible power as organizer of this world shattering contest to impose upon millions of Wikipedians...
Every king needs a jester. -S-
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .
Hi,
just trying to edit Eriks rant to a bit NPOVed version ;-) ...
==== Because there were strong objections against using average (range) voting, for the final voting round on the logos, there is now a FPTP (some prefer to do this voting via Condorcet, please vote on both so we see if they differ) vote in progress on which voting method to use:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_logo_vote/ Vote_on_voting_method
Please do take the opportunity and express your opinion, which voting method should be used. Pros and cons for the different methods are listed on the page. As the voting is one of the larger ones in Wikipedia, the used voting method maybe will set precedence.
Erik has said that he will organize Average or FPTP voting, Taw has signaled s/he's willing to organize Condorcet or Instant-Runoff. ==== __ . / / / / ... Till Westermayer - till we *) . . . mailto:till@tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072 . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179 . . . . .
Till-
Because there were strong objections against using average (range) voting, for the final voting round on the logos, there is now a FPTP (some prefer to do this voting via Condorcet, please vote on both so we see if they differ)
The Condorcet vote is of no relevance whatsoever.
Regards,
Erik
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .
Hi Erik,
Because there were strong objections against using average (range) voting, for the final voting round on the logos, there is now a FPTP (some prefer to do this voting via Condorcet, please vote on both so we see if they differ)
The Condorcet vote is of no relevance whatsoever.
I'd prefer to disagree.
Regards, __ . / / / / ... Till Westermayer - till we *) . . . mailto:till@tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072 . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179 . . . . .
Erik Moeller wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
The Condorcet vote is of no relevance whatsoever.
Simply because you have so decreed, AFAICT.
Your point being?
First, being not meant so brusquely, sorry. (Although actually it wasn't so brusque in the orginal.) But anyway ...
The whole setup looks very odd for Wikipedia. Why is Erik deciding by fiat how things are run? Given that you are, what's the relevance of your comment that you won't participate if they're not run as you like, and other people's comments that they will do it in that case? Why does Tillwe not think that you can make these decisions? This is all a highly unusual thing for Wikipedia, where one person (other than Jimbo) can just say so and it's so. Thus it's no surprise that some people don't like how it's happening. If you're going to assert your authority, then people should know why.
And my point is not to demand that you tell /me/ why; I suspect that I could find out by doing some research. The point is that the reasons for your authority are unclear to people that come into the process to make their votes. Hence "AFAICT" = "as far as I [such a voter] can tell".
But anyway, I apologise if this sounded like an accusation.
-- Toby
Toby-
The whole setup looks very odd for Wikipedia. Why is Erik deciding by fiat how things are run?
Yeah, I make all the important decisions. Like what voting system to use to vote on the voting system we want to use. I provided a rationale for this decision right on the page where it was relevant. Please read it.
Given that you are, what's the relevance of your comment that you won't participate if they're not run as you like,
Very simple. I choose how to spend my time.
But anyway, I apologise if this sounded like an accusation.
It's simply wrong. I have exercised virtually no authority in important matters in this contest.
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
The whole setup looks very odd for Wikipedia. Why is Erik deciding by fiat how things are run?
Yeah, I make all the important decisions. Like what voting system to use to vote on the voting system we want to use. I provided a rationale for this decision right on the page where it was relevant. Please read it.
Of course, I've already read it, down in section 5. But providing a rationale for your decision doesn't change the nature of the decision.
Anyway, the problem is not simply that you're making the decision; you and mav provide a fair case as to why such a thing is necessary. The problem is that the basis for your /authority/ to make it is not explained anywhere, and is unclear to many people there.
Ironically, if you really /did/ make all of the important decisions, then the situation would be easier to understand! (Which is not the same as better, as I'm sure you'll agree.)
Given that you are, what's the relevance of your comment that you won't participate if they're not run as you like,
Very simple. I choose how to spend my time.
Erm ... yes. That's not the tricky part. The tricky part is, if you have the authority to make decisions by fiat, presumably because you're running the process (and so you are!), then one would expect that you'd make the decision by fiat to run Round 2 in such a way that you would in fact wish to participate; rather than let people vote on how to run Round 2 but make the decision by fiat about how /that/ vote is to be run.
This is an example of the irony above, actually.
But anyway, I apologise if this sounded like an accusation.
It's simply wrong. I have exercised virtually no authority in important matters in this contest.
And as mav suggests in his own post, you are to be thanked.
I'm trying to explain why the process is confusing, so that you might come across as much worse than you are. I'm not doing a very good job at that, apparently. '_`
-- Toby
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