Hi Kevin,

Thanks for being patient with me and humoring me with this exercise.
Your email reminded me to reply to Steve Eppley, which I did:
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2020-November/002605.html

In that email, I noted my desire to have a truly excellent article
about the "Monotonicity criterion" (either on Wikipedia or electowiki,
and preferably on both) which is approachable by the layperson.  I
want an article that the reader to learn more (with an appropriate
number of hyperlinks and footnotes), but still doesn't bombard the
reader with acronyms, abbreviation and jargon.

The article on electowiki is here:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Monotonicity

...and the corresponding English Wikipedia article is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion

Both of those articles bombard the reader with mathematical terms, but
do a poor job of using them consistently.

More below:

On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 8:41 PM Kevin Venzke stepjak@yahoo.fr wrote:

Admittedly, "renaming monotonicity" isn't as helpful as being more
explicit.  "Whenver someone says 'monotonicity criterion', assume they
mean 'mono-raise'".

This whole exercise is to help me more deeply understand the Woodall
paper (in particular, the "Woodall Nine"), which is going to involve a
lot more study on my part.  Why do I want to understand the Woodall
Nine?  Well, I want to understand why he broke it up into nine
different criteria, giving them names (mono-raise, mono-raise-delete,
mono-raise-random, mono-append, mono-sub-plump, mono-sub-top,
mono-add-plump, mono-add-top, mono-remove-bottom).  I'm also wondering
why so many election-method experts seem to be conversant in the
distinction between these, but choose to call them all a single
criterion, as if there's a simple pass-fail relationship.

As far as whether it's worth learning, I think that's a judgement call
I want to leave to the person trying to learn about monotonicity.  My
goal is to understand monotonicity much more deeply than I do today,
so that I'm a more effective teacher on the subject.  That's why I
appreciate how you spelled out the "couple of the criteria":

Perfect; thank you!  Like I said, I'm trying to figure out which
criteria I'm going to spend a lot of time trying to teach others via
my writing on electowiki (and elsewhere).

The next portion of your email gives us a very useful taxonomy:

This is incredibly helpful!  I realize I cut out a lot of the
supporting verbiage as I'm "quoting" you, but the trimmed version
gives me a cheat sheet that helps me understand your analysis much
better, and hopefully gives me a framework I can keep in my head to
use when I'm explaining the monotonicity criterion to others.

Thanks for patiently answering my weird questions and accepting my
challenge to make sense of the Woodall Nine.  I'm going to be pretty
busy the rest of this week, but I may decide to start rewriting the
"Monotonicity" article on electowiki next week.  If I do, I'll need to
give you credit somehow.  Thank you!

Rob

Hi Rob,
I see the wiki pages clearly talk about Mono-raise... Maybe the discussion is confusing, but won't it be worse if you discuss another eight criteria, or favor a less common term for the concept? I could see fleshing out the Woodall section at the bottom, calling out the ones that are Mono-raise variants vs. the other three that are implied by Participation (and so not as obviously relevant to the article's main topic).
A couple more responses:

(KV) Rereading the articles I have to concede that he did, at least, think they were important... He states in particular a preference for DAC over IRV, due to these criteria, with DAC satisfying 7 of them vs. IRV's 3. But it certainly appears he devised the criteria before inventing DAC.

(KV) I don't think that's what's happening, I think it's just code-switching based on what terminology will be familiar to the audience one is talking to at that moment. One can't possibly lump them all together as one criterion because basically FPP is the only method that satisfies them all.
Kevin

On 16/11/2020 03.32, Rob Lanphier wrote:

"Monotonicity" is almost always mono-raise. So maybe the Monotonicity
article could detail mono-raise and then have a disambiguation
section or something like it for the other types of monotonicity; kind
of like how the clone independence page is mainly about Tideman's
concept, although Woodall split the clone independence criterion into
three of his own (clone-no-help, clone-no-harm, clone-in).

I'm not myself aware of any paper that uses unqualified "monotonicity"
to mean something else than mono-raise. Authors that refer to e.g.
mono-add-top tend to say mono-add-top.