Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!kuhub.cc.ukans.edu!sloane From: sloane@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: Re: Proposal for changes to the newsgroup creation guidlines. Message-ID: <14980.253c557f@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> Date: 18 Oct 89 15:50:39 GMT References: <14718.2538b6f4@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> Distribution: na Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services Lines: 92 In article , bbc@nysa.rice.edu (Benjamin Chase) writes: > Bob Sloane presents a proposal: > >>5) Votes should be cast [using wildcards] > >>7) Counting the votes may be done as follows... > >>Please keep in mind that this is just a proposal. I welcome any comment >>anyone has to make. > > Well, you asked for comments, and mine is that your wildcards were too > complex. I'll admit your scheme is concise, but IMHO is too confusing > for many users. (Just as "IMHO" and similar abbreviations are concise > but confusing to USENET novices.) A user-interface expert (such as > the guy with whom I share an office) would say that your wildcard > specifications are "too unixy". Perhaps you've been using Unix and > its syntax for regular expressions for so long that you don't even see > this possibility? Hmmm. I specifically allowed for english language voting in the procedure I wrote up. Perhaps I didn't make that clear. The vote: "I think that any sci group should not be created, but vote FOR any rec group." would be OK. How is this too "unixy?" I fully intended to make it as easy as possible to cast votes for the name the voter likes best. If the voter can't make a clear statement about what he/she wants to vote for/against, then perhaps he/she should think about it some more. > Let's compare two other schemes. First, the ballot elided above, written > in Alien Wells' style: > > sci.aquaria no > sci.bio.aquaria no > sci.aquarium no > sci.bio.aquarium no > sci.aquariums no > sci.bio.aquariums no > rec.aquaria yes > rec.aquarium yes > rec.aquariums yes > rec.pets.aquaria yes > rec.pets.aquarium yes > rec.pets.aquariums yes > rec.pets.fish yes This would also be a valid vote in my scheme. I never said that you HAD to use wildcards, just that you could if you wanted. The only real difference between my scheme and Alien's is that I allow the voter to write in group names, and allow (NOT require) a more concise way of specifying the votes. >[much about a preferential scheme of voting deleted] > After collecting the preferential ballots, tally them according to > their first choice. Next, iteratively throw out the lowest > vote-winner (that is, the "loser"), redistributing its votes to the > other candidates, according to the next highest choices on the ballots > of that loser. I am not sure I understand how this works. Suppose the vote counter decides to count votes for sci.fish first, and that group passes. Can the vote taker stop there and announce that sci.fish has passed? I guess I just don't understand "tally them accourding to their first choice." Does this mean that you count the votes as if only the first name in the list counted? If so, then how do you "throw out the lowest vote-winner?" How is this proposal different than Single Transferable Vote? Could you supply some sample votes and how to count them? > The process stops when one candidate attains a particular victory > condition. If the winning candidate is "none-of-the-below", no group > is created. Possible victory conditions might be: > 1) majority of votes cast > 2) majority, coupled with a certain margin over "none-of-the-above" > 3) a certain percentage margin over all the other candidates > 4) ? > I leave the choice of the victory conditions to the more experienced > members of news.groups. It sounds to me as if the vote taker has quite a bit of leeway in deciding what the group name will be, simply by picking in what order to try the votes. The problem with the current scheme is that many people don't care about the name at all, and just vote YES for any group at all. I suspect that there would be enough of these "any name" votes to pass just about any group. In the aquaria debate, the vote taker would start out with sci.aquaria (assuming that was his/her personal favorite) and if it passed, stop counting, even though rec.guppies (or whatever, I'm trying not to offend anyone here :-) got more yes and fewer no votes. -- USmail: Bob Sloane, University of Kansas Computer Center, Lawrence, KS, 66045 E-mail: sloane@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu, sloane@ukanvax.bitnet, AT&T: (913)864-0444 "The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage." -- Mark Russell