User talk:RRichie

Welcome!

Hello, RRichie, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome! MilesAgain (talk) 05:37, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Your recent edits

Hi there. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. On many keyboards, the tilde is entered by holding the Shift key, and pressing the key with the tilde pictured. You may also click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your name and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you! --SineBot (talk) 14:39, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Your vote at Abd's RfA

Hello there, I have stricken through part of your contribution here because it related to off-wiki activity. There is really no way that any user's posts in another forum entirely can have any bearing on their work here. (There is in any case the difficulty in authenticating that the posts do in fact come from the same editor.) If you have objections to Abd's adminship, I'm sure you can find examples of on-wiki behaviour to support these.

I have left your oppose vote intact, it is still counting against him. You do not have to give your reasons for an oppose, although reasons backed up with diffs from Wikipedia always strengthen a case. Kim Dent-Brown ^(Talk) 18:06, 16 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Good to know. I'm certainly glad Abd's been rejected for any special administrative powers at Wikipedia. Even his latest post in the last day in IRV discussion about FairVote's alleged motivations are simply wrong... RRichie (talk) 19:52, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You mean about why FairVote chose to call it IRV? What was the true reason? Ron Duvall (talk) 20:06, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No, Ron, I meant his whole thing that we only support IRV because we see it as a road to STV rather than good in itself for single-winner elections. IRV is a name that makes sense to people. RRichie (talk) 22:43, 18 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Richie, it might affect your satisfaction if you notice that the controlling reason was my lack of sufficient edit history, something easily remediable within a few months if I actually wanted to be an administrator, which I don't. And everything I've done, including reams of stuff you considered totally outrageous, was out on the table. User:Yellowbeard, by canvassing you, Tom, and Terrill, revealed his association with you, not that it was not already clear, but it was only clear to someone with detailed knowledge.

I have no idea who yellowbeard is. But it did seem like a quite a few of the opposing votes on you don't like what you say/do and how you say it as well, Abd.

Now it's plain to see, if it ever matters, and the net affect on my RfA was zero. But suit yourself, if you want to be happy, who am I to rain on your parade? I'll tell you this, though: I'm totally pleased by that RfA, it was much better than I anticipated. Some voters seemed to assume that I'd been active since 2005. Instead, I only started serious editing and learning Wikipedia policy at the end of September, 2007, or less than five months ago. It would have been completely astonishing if I'd been accepted. But I was nominated, I think, because the nominator wanted me to see something, and the community as well. Seems to have worked. Have a nice day.--Abd (talk) 21:27, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

He probably would have been a good admin too, although my only concern is that his attention would have been drawn away from Wikipedia:Delegable proxy, which I need his help on. You probably were unaware that an admin's extra capabilities are basically maintenance-related; they are limited to implementing the community's consensus and are pretty much supposed to back off of any issues that they themselves are involved with and get another admin to intervene if needed.

About this other stuff, though - can't we all just get along? I mean, we are all intelligent people and should be able to work together to come up with an unbiased, balanced, informative, well-sourced article. I don't believe that it's necessary to tear down IRV to promote approval voting, or DP, or any of these other systems - in fact, I think it could be harmful. But I don't think we should dismiss alternative systems either and act like IRV is the only game in town. I am fond of comparing it to World War II. The US and USSR did not get along and basically didn't trust each other. But, we joined forces to fight a common enemy. Then, after the war was over, we went back to being at each other's throats. And in the end, the better system won. Well, why not join forces against single-member district plurality, since that is what we all agree is a bad system? Just like the US fought Germany from the west and the USSR fought Germany from the east, you can attack plurality on one front and we'll attack it on another. And once we've vanquished plurality, we can duke it out amongst ourselves for which non-plurality system will prevail. You may well change your mind about IRV if, after more implementations, its results disappoint you. The same thing may happen with our DP project. I'm open-minded as to what is the best system, and I say give them all a try. One thing's for sure - we've been trying single-district plurality long enough.

I realize that Abd's posts take a lot of time to read, but he has a lot of insights and can actually help you make the article better. Every organization and project needs a (for lack of a better phrase) devil's advocate, someone who is willing to point out the weaknesses. Fortunately, DP has attracted many of them, and it is greatly helping our project. Just remember, the key with Wikipedia is to stay focused on citable facts, because that is where you will find your common ground. Original research - i.e., interpretations, analyses, etc. originated by Wikipedians, rather than coming from what we deem to be reliable sources - has no place here, and must be removed, even if it is correct. Repeated attempts to add such material, or remove relevant cited facts, in the absence of consensus to do so on the talk page, are potentially blockable offenses. If it appears that including a lot of certain kinds of material is making the article unbalanced toward one point of view or another, some of that content can be split off into a separate article and summarized in the main article. So, on those bases, everyone can make progress toward a mutually acceptable article. Ron Duvall (talk) 22:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Rob, I understand that Ron is a very experienced Wikipedian, using a new account for personal reasons. It shows. He's right about the process. --Abd (talk) 22:47, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Abd, we didn't pick fights with range voting and approval voting advocates! And Ron, we're fine with other people doing their thing.Our focus for single-winner reform is IRV, and we're quite content to focus on it. But it's a pain when people like Abd spend much of their activist time attacking us personally and IRV in general. As for Abd's posts here, sometimes he is fine for sure, but I think he's just wrong on other things -- the classic one being his refusal to accept that Robert's Rules really is crystal clear that they think IRV should be used for vote-by-mail elections where you aren't going to do repeated balloting. He also can be prone to leap to conclusions (feeling FairVote must hae written the IRV article on Wikipedia, say, which isn't true). But indeed it can all be a bit tiresome. RRichie (talk) 22:43, 18 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

RONR doesn't say that IRV in particular is the best system for vote-by-mail elections, just that "In an international or national society where the election is conducted by mail ballot, a plurality is sometimes allowed to elect officers, with a view to avoiding the delay and extra expense that would result from additional balloting under these conditions. A better method in such cases is for the bylaws to prescribe some form of preferential voting." (p. 392). Preferential could mean Bordin, Bucklin, Condorcet, Contingent, Coombs, you name it.

I can see how you might get tired of it if you have a lot of other stuff you'd rather be attending to, I just happen to love editing Wikipedia as a hobby so I could this all day if time allowed. In reference to the range voting stuff, from what I saw, Clay went around spamming every IRV listserv and responding in every public forum that IRV proposals were being made a couple years back, and FairVote was mainly responding to those attacks. On wiki, I can see there have been five or six archives of talk pages about IRV and some bad blood. But as more or less of an outsider, it's easy for me to just take the view of, let's forget that past stuff and move on toward making this a good article.

You can focus on IRV, that's your prerogative of course; I think we do all agree that STV is a pretty good system. I think in the end, the main thing we need to do is get rid of the presidential system and switch to a parliamentary system which could be elected by STV, and/or perhaps even use delegable proxy. IRV is always going to have some issues, which can be fixed by going to STV. But if it's a single-winner election, how can you really use STV? The presidential system itself is inherently problematic no matter how it's elected; most countries that have tried it experienced constitutional breakdowns, and even here, we see a lot of abuses, such as the President (a public employee) claiming the right to speak with energy industry leaders in a non-transparent way, as part of efforts for formulation of energy policy. In a parliamentary system, Congress would have more power to rein in presidential abuses. Just something to think about. Ron Duvall (talk) 01:25, 19 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I'm a fan of STV for multi-winner offices and a fan of IRV for single-winner offices. We have lots of single-winner elections here and I suspect will for a long time...... On Robert's Rules, they proceed to define IRV as the one example they give of IRV, and that helps explain why so many private associations use IRV. .... As to Clay, he's still very active in his anti-IRV spamming. But yes, would be nice to move on. With Poundstone giving range such a good plug, maybe they can try to do something positive .... I just don't expect it, particularly with some of the emails I just received from Warren Smith today. Anyway, onward we go.RRichie (talk) 04:41, 19 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Use of interspersal response on Wikipedia.

Rob, using interspersal to respond, chopping up an original edit, is disapproved, such as you did at [1]. If you need to respond piecemeal, quote the original. You can see an example in my RfA, on the Talk page, where I respond to your striken comments from the project page. I copied your striken comments and responded to them one phrase at a time, italicising them to clearly distinguish them from my responses. I know you might trust me about as far as you could throw me, so ask another user you trust if you think I'm just trying to make trouble for you. I'm not. Not here, anyway. --Abd (talk) 21:18, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Got it. And of course I know you want to make trouble for other reformers with whom you disagree. RRichie (talk) 22:45, 18 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You know what you think you know, but you don't know what I want.--Abd (talk) 00:25, 19 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]