User:Scott Ritchie

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This user is a participant in the Voting systems WikiProject.

Scott Ritchie lives in Davis, California and is originally from Lafayette, California. He also contributes to the Davis Wiki. Elsewhere on the internet he is a Wine packager for Ubuntu. Wine Wiki Page Ubuntu Wiki Page

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Click here for an up-to-date list of his wiki contributions.

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Contents 1 Proposed Change to Naming Convention Guidelines 2 Featured articles I have made major contributions to 3 Watchlist idea 4 Useful Links 5 Election vocabulary 6 Disambig page cleanup 7 Current works in progress 8 Todo later 9 Dual-licensing: this doesn't take long

[edit] Proposed Change to Naming Convention Guidelines

I have a slight change to the naming conventions proposed based on observations in my work with the voting articles. Currently, they seem to be interpretted a bit ambiguously. See /Naming.

[edit] Featured articles I have made major contributions to

• Single Transferable Vote
• Voting system

[edit] Watchlist idea

It occured to me that one of the best ways for a page to be protected from vandals, spam, and nonsense is for it to be on a bunch of Wikipedians' watchlists. Perhaps there should be a way for an article to indicate how many watchlists its on? Perhaps we could tie it in with the proposed validation procedures.

[edit] Useful Links

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style
• Wikipedia:Captions

[edit] Election vocabulary

The following words make no sense:

• constituency - can mean a district for holding an election, OR the people in said district, OR a subset of those people, OR a group of supporters for even non elected people
• electoral district - always means a district for holding an election, however this term isn't used much outside of the US
• electorate - Can mean "constituency" in the people sense (especially in US), however in Australian it can mean "constituency" in the district sense
• riding - has the same meaning as electoral district in Canada, but is considered slang
• ward - an electoral district for local government, OR a region for party bosses in the US

Currently, the article at constituency seems to be confusing all 3 of the definitions it has - perhaps we should have several different articles. Then again, they're rather related, so maybe we should have one or two.

• preferential voting - can mean using a ranked ballot, or can mean instant-runoff voting, or can mean Single Transferable Vote
• instant-runoff voting - only means single winner, ranked ballot elections using the voting system described there
• IRV+ - actually means condorcet voting
• Single Transferable Vote - Usually means multiple-winner STV, however sometimes used to refer to IRV
• alternative vote - always means instant-runoff

Draft proposal to put up at RFC/village pump:

• Have electoral district refer to what's mostly at the constituency article now, except for the lead which is about all sorts of things
• Turn electorate into a disambig page (it's mostly a wiktionary entry as it is)
• Similarly, turn riding into a disambig page and move the content there to electoral district
• Again, merge ward (politics) into electoral district and some amount of local government (for when ward means more than district)
• Ward is already a disambig page, keep it that way
• Have constituency refer to the people represented, with a disambig pointer to electoral district at the top and a small note about the other forms of representation that don't necessarily refer to ALL the people (especially "core constituency")

[edit] Disambig page cleanup

There are a lot of disambig pages that need cleanup to conform with MoS:DP. If you see one, tag it with {{disambig-cleanup}} instead of {{disambig}} There is also a Disambiguation WikiProject

[edit] Current works in progress

I'm currently trying to get these to featured status. Please help!

• Table of voting systems by nation
  • Finish merge of tables
  • Make UK,Wales,Scotland,N.Ireland one entry
• Wine (software)
  • Lots in todo list
• Plurality voting system
  • Complete rework...
  • Show example of California recall election, which had no primaries, and how x% of the people didn't vote for the two obvious frontrunners.
  • Section on the spoiler effect and how primaries and runoff voting were designed as partial workarounds.
  • Because of duverge's law and the resulting tendency towards two-party system, additional parties in countries using the plurality voting system are frequently given the moniker of third party. Perhaps even have a section on third parties.
• Instant-runoff voting
  • Complete rework...
• Gerrymandering
  • redo that computer section with Delay POV and US centrism (move content, rewrite)
  • mention iowa and the judge commissions and such they have in the proposed reforms section
  • Note that STV makes gerrymandering harder in Ireland
  • Note that in Germany wasted party-votes only occur if party <5%
  • Mention multi-member districts as a reform, as they reduce the wasted vote effect if using proportional representation or a semi-proportional method (bloc voting, however, will not reduce the number of wasted votes)
• Cumulative voting
  • note unusual incentive to give bad polling information to make the opponents overextend themselves.
  • "Finally, cumulative voting has a pro-incumbent bias in both partisan and non-partisan elections. Supporters of a party or interest group are likely to discourage challenges to incumbents favoring their position and not to risk giving votes to the challengers who do run." [1]
  • Strategy is to get voters to dump all their points on you...
• Bloc voting
  • Note strategy
  • Note unconstitutional, yet still in use
  • Mention banned by act of congress, which also bans multimember districts, for congressional elections
  • Note clones of a candidate with majority support will win (in fact, the optimal strategy is to have a slate of clones)
• Droop Quota
  • Note that Meek pointed out that not adding +1 would result in a true tie.
  • Also note droop criterion, or droop proportionality
• Representation (politics)
  • Move malapportionment back in, summary style
  • Make descriptive representation its own article

These are related to the Voting Systems WikiProject and the Campaigns and Elections WikiProject.

[edit] Todo later

• public good

• Note that the definition doesn't imply it's being financed by the government, nor does it need to be (a frequent confusion) - also doesn't include private goods funded by governments
• Note open source software as a common example, and cite where it's used as such.

• Corporate election
• FairTax

• Create a section on progressivity debate, move a bunch of junk into there.
• Also put in the cool graph from the FairTax site (with permission)

• Create a good template to replace Template:Politics
• Change the Template:Elections to be the Election Politics series once I make that article.

• Give it a link back to politics, but probably remove the politics by country stuff.

• Runoff voting
• Folding@home
• Voter turnout

• Mention some of the studies learned about in class, effects of turnout in local government, effects of voting systems

+turnout: competitive elections, higher stakes elections (president vs county dogcatcher)

-turnout: gerrymandering, lack of candidates (sometimes even no contested elections on the ballot)

More media on an election raises turnout, however these tend to follow from competitive elections ("horse race coverage") as well as higher stakes elections (who cares about the dogcatcher race?)

hmm, might be beaten to this as voter turnout is a featured article.

• Local government in the United States

unaninimouty tradition; consensus decision-making

• Single winner voting system
• Multiple winner voting system
• Nonproportional voting system
• Brownfield
• Dilon's rule
• Council of Government

• COG

• Median Voter Theorem
• Ecological footprint

criticism of counting the use of land which would otherwise not be used for anything as a contributor to a larger ecological footprint. "When I was alone in my living room, my mom told me 'Don't sprawl out on the couch, if everyone did that, we'd need 5 living rooms!'"

• Wikiproject:Creating good articles about rich people and other major potential donors so we don't scare them away

[edit] Dual-licensing: this doesn't take long

The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-By-SA) is a lot like the GFDL, but without the invariant sections and the Stallman power trip. It's also much clearer about how to attribute contributions.

The GFDL might be fixed. Or CC-By-SA might make it obsolete. Wikipedia is already incompatible with lots of other free content that uses CC-By-SA. By multi-licensing your content, you can help Wikipedia prepare for whatever happens, and make your contributions usable (with attribution) in other free content. All you need to do is add this to your user page:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

	Multi-licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License versions 1.0 and 2.0
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0 and version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.