Xref: utzoo news.admin:7286 news.groups:13446 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!wuarchive!kuhub.cc.ukans.edu!sloane From: sloane@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups Subject: Re: These new voting schemes Message-ID: <15249.253f3716@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> Date: 20 Oct 89 20:17:42 GMT References: <4771@ncar.ucar.edu> Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services Lines: 60 In article <4771@ncar.ucar.edu>, woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) writes: > Recently we have all seen a lot of new voting schemes suggested whose major > goal (and a laudable one) is to provide a way of resolving > controversial naming issues. Without exception, they all solve this > problem but without addressing one crucial issue that is paramount: > VERIFICATION. The only reason why the current voting scheme works (by > "works" I mean that most site admins on the net are willing to abide by > the results of it) is that it is easily VERIFIABLE. You make an very good point here. While I would be willing to accept your verification of the vote, perhaps others wouldn't. OK, suppose we accept Alien Well's method. As I understand it, he proposed that the call for votes would contain a list of possible group names, and voters could vote YES or NO for any or all of the groups mentioned. A table would be compiled of the YES/NO votes, and some selection criteria applied to decide if the group gets created, and what name it should have. The results of the voting would be posted as follows: YES NO sci.lith-dogs 123 98 rec.lith-dogs 142 23 rec.pets.lith-dogs 147 4 ... Then the list of voters could be posted in the following form: group.name1 yes_or_no voter_name group.name2 yes_or_no voter_name group.name3 yes_or_no voter_name ... Now I am no unix guru, but couldn't you verify the vote by doing something like using grep to find all the yes votes for a specific name and piping that into wc -l? Maybe something like: grep "^sci.lith-dogs *yes" file >wc -l grep "^sci.lith-dogs *no" file >wc -l grep "^rec.lith-dogs *yes" file >wc -l ... Never having used unix, I can't be sure, but I suspect that this wouldn't be too hard to do. I suspect I could find a way to do it on VMS, so I am sure unix could handle it some way. Yes, I realize that the size of the vote results would go up, but I think an order of magnitude is a little pessimistic. Wouldn't it just be multiplied by the number of names under consideration? Right now we send in one line per voter for 1 group. Under the new scheme, we would send in one line per voter per group name. In the aquaria case, this might be 5 or 6 possible name, but usually it would only be 1 or 2. In any case, would the increase in traffic be more or less than the traffic generated by the flame wars over the name? Just how much traffic is generated by vote summaries? Would making them an order of magnitude larger really be the bad if it reduced the flamage over the name selection? -- 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