"Instant-runoff voting" article renamed to "Ranked-choice voting" on English Wikipedia
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@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
On 2024-10-22 00:19, Closed Limelike Curves 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.
I don't think it's just a stemming issue. The first Wikipedia page for
the search "alternative vote" for me is the one for instant-runoff
voting (although it's not the first actual match).
Maybe you'd say that doesn't count, since it isn't the first match. But
searching for "top two runoff" gives me the Wikipedia article on the
"Two-round system" as the first match. That's hardly the same phrase.
-km
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@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@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
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
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@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
Here's what's being overlooked about the actual meaning of "ranked
choice voting."
A word or phrase can have two or more definitions. Specifically, in a
dictionary (rather than an encyclopedia) the entry for "ranked choice
voting" might look like this, with two definitions:
"ranked choice voting (1) a voting method that uses ranked choice
ballots on which a voter ranks the options to indicate an order of
preference (2) a voting method that counts ranked choice ballots in
rounds where a ballot counts as support for the highest-ranked option
that has not yet been eliminated, and during each counting round the
option with the fewest supporting votes is eliminated"
In other words, the broader definition covers any voting method that
uses ranked choice ballots, and the narrower definition refers to IRV.
I'll call these definitions RCV[1] and RCV[2].
FairVote actively promotes RCV[2] as if it's the only available option,
and yet also they pretend they are promoting RCV[1]. They pretend
Condorcet methods do not fit within RCV[1] and instead are a separate
category worthy of criticism for being too complex.
STAR fans attack RCV[1] using criticisms against RCV[2]. Quietly some
of them advocate the RCV[1] method named "ranked robin" when they know
they will be criticized for recommending STAR.
Fans of cardinal ballots, such as the Center for Election Science,
criticize RCV[1] as if RCV[2] is the only kind of RCV[1]. (IMO they too
pretend Condorcet methods do not fit within RCV[1].)
The standard way for an encyclopedia to handle this duality is to have
two encyclopedia articles. In this case one article named "ranked
choice voting" will explain RCV[1], and the other article named "instant
runoff voting" will explain RCV[2]. Of course the beginning of the
RCV[1] article will refer to RCV[2] as a well-known subset of RCV[1].
Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, it should follow this convention.
Whoever is vandalizing Wikipedia pages about election methods, please
stop.
To anyone who is tempted to suggest "you should directly edit Wikipedia
pages," years ago I tried that for several years. Alas, a few people
with a bias for specific election methods (previously Schulze and
FairVote, now STAR, approval, score, cardinal methods, etc.) have much
more time than I do. (Also I wasted too much time battling antagonistic
Wikipedia admin editors.)
(Wikipedia has a similar problem with the articles named "vote
splitting" and "spoiler effect" and "independence of irrelevant
alternatives." Apparently some STAR fans are trying to support their
recent claim that IRV is vulnerable to "vote splitting." This
misleading claim appeared a few months ago in the supposedly "academic"
article about STAR voting.)
If anyone disagrees that a word can have more than one meaning, look at
the many meanings of the word "set":
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/set
Currently my response times in this E-M forum are slower. That's
because I'm now accessing this email account using a web browser instead
of my email "client" (Thunderbird). Hopefully that will change when I
get more time after this election.
Richard Fobes
On 2024-10-18 13:12, Closed Limelike Curves wrote:
But, in any case, my main comments on this are that Wikipedia policy is
actually very clear on this issue.
- Wikipedia requires using the common name for a thing, even if it's a
misnomer or less-than-ideal. For example, the articles are titled
"morning sickness" and "Panama hat" instead of "Nausea and vomiting of
pregnancy" or "That hat from Ecuador sometimes called a Panama hat".
This helps both with search results and with ensuring neutrality in
naming disputes: the San Francisco Board of Elections would argue "RCV"
is accurate because voters do rank the candidates, but that "IRV" is
inaccurate because the results aren't instantly available. - Wikipedia requires following the lead of a majority of reliable
sources. Overwhelmingly, reliable sources (e.g. media, academic papers,
and so on) use and explicitly define RCV to mean IRV, not ranked voting
methods in general.
On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 10:05 AM Closed Limelike Curves
closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com wrote:
The Electowiki article covers this. The name IRV is a promotional name
pushed by FairVote in the early 2000s. The name never really caught on
and was never used by anyone but FairVote and Wikipedia, because the
first place to adopt it (San Francisco) renamed it "Ranked-choice
voting" because they thought the name IRV would confuse people into
expecting the results to be released "instantly" (immediately after
polls closed). The term IRV has never seen much widespread use outside
voting theory circles and FairVote.
On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 9:09 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm
km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no wrote: On 2024-10-18 17:38, Chris Benham
wrote:
I gather that "Instant Runoff Voting" was originally a promotional
name
in the US that after being used for a long time was changed (for some
reason I forget) to Ranked Choice Voting.
From what I understand, one of the public-facing organizations (might
have been the LWV) suggested the name because, to the voter, the
characteristic feature is that you rank the candidates. And then
FairVote found out that it helped their advocacy, so it stuck.
-km
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
info
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
info