Talk:Quadratic voting

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 August 2019 and 4 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Melissawwang. Peer reviewers: Jameswang323, Shrino, Berkeleynicholas, Oliviadey, Adamng926, Mervitan.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:53, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 26 August 2020 and 2 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Ryanliou, Sid900. Peer reviewers: Esk00, Ethanpak, H.Susanna, Lucaskim7, Candreaangulo, Jeshgus, Thenihalsingh, Lindseyjli3.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:53, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

See below regarding some problems with content that had apparently been added as part of this assignment. Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:57, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

Penrose method

Quadratic voting reminds me of the Penrose method. Markus Schulze 15:12, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

I've added that in a new "See also" section. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:18, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Additional source

• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/a-new-way-of-voting-that-makes-zealotry-expensive -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:58, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Potential Articles to Include

"Wayback Machine" (PDF). web.archive.org. 2017-03-01. Retrieved 2019-09-16.

Bilton, Nick (2010-07-06). "Changing Government and Tech With Geeks". Bits Blog. Retrieved 2019-09-16.

"Code for America Announces 2019 Fellowship Program". www.govtech.com. Retrieved 2019-09-16.

America, Code for. "Code for America Summit 2019". Code for America. Retrieved 2019-09-16.
Lee, Sherman. "Quadratic Voting: A New Way to Govern Blockchains for Enterprises". Forbes. Retrieved 2019-10-01.
Posner, Eric (2017). "Quadratic Voting and the Public Good: Introduction". Public Choice.

Melissawwang (talk) 21:50, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Proposed augmentation/Heads-up about a re-write

I am working to re-write this page to augment Melissawwang's stalwart contributions with some more references from the QV and economics literature. My first stab will be in the History section, and then I will move on to the other sections. My edits will aim to better align the QV page with current academic understanding and emerging consensus about artificial currency QV, and to dive a bit deeper on what is being done with QV. Mgibby5 (talk) 18:19, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

I have done a relatively deep re-write of the history section and a reasonable re-write of the introduction. Next, I will do a re-write of the mechanism section. Mgibby5 (talk) 00:32, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Upcoming Edits

I will be adding and doing edits to this article. Here are some ideas I am planning on implementing:

• Reformatting the structure of the document
  • History of Quadratic Voting and Applications both contain the same paragraph about Colorado so I'll be deleting the 'History of Quadratic Voting' section and consolidating everything into the Applications section.
  • I'll be separating the Applications section into two subsections: Origination of Idea and Applications throughout the world
    • Within the origination of idea, there will be 2 sections: 'Development in Public Good' and 'Development in Corporate Governance'
    • Within the Applications throughout the World, there will be 2 sections 'United States' and 'Taiwan'
• Adding more information on E. Glen Weyl and his specific developments to the original idea and its use in Corporate Governance (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2264245)
• Adding a section under History of Quadratic Voting for Taiwan's use quadratic voting (https://medium.com/@yahsinhuangtw/highlights-from-first-radicalxchange-taipei-meetup-f2a9c3b797ab)
• Adding a section for criticisms about the issues with individual security of Quadratic Voting (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.05300.pdf)
• Adding a section for businesses that are responsible for developing Quadratic Voting like Democracy Earth, Collective Design Engineers, and RadicalxChange with a short bio detailing each of their missions involving quadratic voting
• Fixing grammar mistakes

I'm also super open to any suggestions! Ryanliou (talk) 00:37, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Bibliography

1. https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-quadratic-voting-4f81805d5a06

2. https://economics.rice.edu/sites/g/files/bxs876/f/Weyl%20(paper)%20-%20Feb%202017.pdf

3. https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/pdfs/Rodrik/workshop%2014-15/Weyl-Quadratic_Voting.pdf — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sid900 (talk • contribs) 18:29, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Peer Review from Civic Tech

I thought the introduction to quadratic voting is really well written because it explains an overview of the definition and origin. The article complies with informing the reader and complies with academic neutral language. I'd suggest including more citations, fixing grammar mistakes, add a more detailed analysis and include external links. There are missing citations and statements that weren't cited and include original work. this needs to be fixed.Candreaangulo (talk) 03:36, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

Peer Review:

I think the topic sentences give a great concise definition of what Quadratic Voting is and overall the lead gives an overview of what the rest of the article will discuss. Overall, I think the article contains a lot of information that often is un-cited, and needs to be re-organized to make the article more concise. Lastly, I agree that the wiki article is missing a section about business today such as Democracy Earth to give more context about the subject of Quadratic voting. Esk00 (talk) 06:46, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

Duplicate sources?

There are two different footnotes to "Quadratic voting as efficient corporate governance" (can't tell if it's the same work), and two different footnotes with the same link to "The new voting system that could save our democracies. nesta." -- AnonMoos (talk) 00:18, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Democracy Earth page doesn't exist

There's a link to Democracy Earth but that just redirects to the Sybil attack page. I don't know what normal policies are here, but it was very confusing to me as a reader (I thought it was a broken link). Perhaps the link should be removed if there isn't at least a stub page? Phoenix00017 (talk) 18:34, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Source for the simplified formula?

Where does the formula "cost to the voter = (number of votes)²" come from? I don't have access to the paywalled WSJ source for this formula. But e.g. this Vitalik Buterin essay, when talking about the original paper by Weyl, says: "Now, you might ask, where does the quadratic come from? Well, the marginal cost of the n'th vote is $n (or $0.01 * n), but the total cost of n votes is ~~n²/2.".

So on the Wiki page, what happened to the factor 1/2? MondSemmel2 (talk) 23:04, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Source review for Taiwan’s implementation needed

I’m not familiar with Wiki edits so forgive me if this is the wrong approach, but I’ve read that Taiwan has implemented quadratic voting on its e-democracy platform Join. While I reviewed the source article from [28], which quoted someone who was involved in the design of the website, this platform either never had this voting scheme in the first place, or have been removed since the publish of the two online source articles; I will further verify this later on by reviewing Web Archives. I’m from Taiwan so was able to verify the current system by creating an account of the platform and testing all of its function, but did not see any systems resembling quadratic voting; there are no explicit explanation of the “99 points” system nor could I find any place that used this point system; each systems and petition was voted on a one-person-one-vote basis. You can visit this website at https://join.gov.tw/ and verify. If there are other sources that says otherwise, it may be helpful to update and edit the new sources into this section as well. Shinzellinn (talk) 07:21, 14 November 2024 (UTC)

@Shinzellinn: Thank you for raising this issue. For reference, here is the passage at issue in the current article version (originally added here by User:Ryanliou, a student editor according to the notice above):

Another application is Taiwan's government-run e-democracy platform Join. This platform utilizes the quadratic voting system to encourage public participation in budget matters. Citizens having 99 points to assign to their preferred policies using the standard quadratic voting model. With over 4 million active participants, anyone can start an e-petition for a certain policy. When it surpasses 5,000 signatures, corresponding government sectors will address the questioned issue by holding a collaborative meeting. So far, Taiwan has held 40 collaborative meetings spanning topics of tax filing, medical resource distribution, or environmental maintenance in national parks.

References

Generally speaking, Wikipedia articles have to be based on information published in reliable sources, and not on editors' own investigations (WP:NOR). These policies can sometimes cause unsatisfactory situations when we personally know that such a source is mistaken about a particular fact.

That said,

• The first reference [1] is marked as an opinion piece, which per WP:NEWSOPED are rarely reliable for statements of fact (this might be mitigated if we knew that the Economist had a dedicated fact-checking process in place for such opinion articles, but I don't know if that is the case). What's more, it does not seem to mention quadratic voting at all (also not in this version archived around the time it was cited here), so it should never have been used as a reference for these claims in the first place.
• The second reference [2] is an article from a new publication regarded as generally reliable (WP:CSMONITOR). However, quadratic voting is only mentioned a single time there (Citizens help select the projects on Taiwan’s government-run “Join” e-democracy platform, which has so far hosted more than 10 million unique visitors, using a sophisticated system called quadratic voting. Each person has 99 points to award to their favorite projects based on their preferences, resulting in a more “fair, balanced, and ... pro-social” outcome because it more fully captures people’s choices, Ms. Tang says.) And from the context it is clear that this statement is based on interview statements only (by Audrey Tang, also the author of the opinion piece cited as the first reference).

On balance, the current version clearly has serious sourcing problems even before we consider other sources or inspect the website in question directly. I am removing this passage for the time being. If someone could come up with additional independent reliable sources or clarifications, that would be great.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:54, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

@HaeB Thank you for the detailed response and explanation of common practice. The platform in question doesn't have an English version so it's probably not useful to cite it here, but the regulation of the platform does have an official translation available here. Chapter two details the way in which the platform runs its proposals, which again, does not mention quadratic voting nor the point system. The original cited article could have been a mix-up on the writer's part on Audrey Tang's explanation on Presidential Hackathon, which does in fact employed the 99 point system, as explained in this recording of Audrey Tang in the conference. Shinzellinn (talk) 07:41, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, that adds a little more weight to leaving it out of this article.

Just as a general note, while English-language sources are indeed preferred, citing non-English sources is OK (see WP:NONENG; providing a translation of the relevant parts is advised in such cases). Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:01, 19 November 2024 (UTC)