Talk:Single transferable vote/Archive 1

message: SIngle Transferable Vote is ALWAYS capitalised and treated as a proper noun. Similarly, when linked with proportional representation and spoken of as 'Proportional Representation through a Single Transferable Vote, the term is used as a proper noun. JTD 20:25 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)
: I'm sceptical, it's not a proper noun in the usual meaning of the term.  It's similar to party-list proportional representation and similar articles, which are not capitalised according to Wikipedia naming conventions. ( 23:59 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)
::I agree. A Google search also indicates that this term is often not capitalized and our rule is that unless a term is either a proper noun or always capitalized then the term should be in the lower case. I'll move the article myself. --mav
It is capitalised when referring to the system. It is not capitalised when referring to the methodology. It is appreviated as PR.STV never pr.stv. (If that is done in an essay by a student of political science, they invariably get a right bollocking and are told to learn the basics of political science.) 
A google search is absolutely useless because you cannot tell in which context it is being used in each article on it. (Not that google searches are a particularly reliable source of anything. It doesn't rely on trustworthy sources but any sources, from the best available to sheer garbage. All it takes is for a lot of sources to feed some wrong fact off each other and hey presto we have the Gospel of Google. Google suggests that we should have an article on William Gladstone. But do a search of proper academic sources and you find he should be (as every student of British politics and history knows) William E Gladstone or William Ewart Gladstone, never William Gladstone. When that sort of standard was applied, and not merely a google search, the page was renamed with a full consensus. 
Another example: According to a google search: 
Charles Windsor: 393,000
Charles Mountbatten-Windsor: 352
Yet his name is not Charles Windsor and 393,000 references are wrong. His name is Charles Mountbatten-Windsor - sources: his own office, Buckingham Palace press office, banns posted at his marriage. So on this and so many other issues, google is complete and utter crap. 
So please Mav, stop relying on google. It is in many many many cases absolutely unreliable rubbish. STÓD/ÉÍRE 00:27 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)
:Thus I said "indicated." We are also not talking about a fact here but usage by English speakers. Therefore Google is a useful external tool to consider that doesn't rely on our own POV. The fact does still remain that the term in question is not a proper noun and is not always capitalized (and this article should cover both the system and methodology). I wasn't the one who moved the article BTW; paren beat me to it. ---mav
If it is describing the system, it generally is. If it is describing merely the methodology, it isn't. The article on wiki is describing the system known and referred to in political science textbooks as Single Transferable Vote (STV). Or when used with proportional representation, it is called PT-STV or PR.STV. Only where textbooks describe a vote outcome through a single transferable vote is it not capitalised. Usage depends on context, and in this context, it is generally capitalised. In fact failure to capitalise it in an exam context where it was being used as in the article would see student docked marks because in political science faculties it would be seen as simply and factually wrong, as wrong as writing  the 'princess of Wales' when you are talking about a specific Princess of Wales and not all princesses of Wales. I know I sound a bit petantic here, but I know if university students read a page about the specific voting system written as 'single transferable vote' they are not going to take wiki as a serious sourcebook, thinking that if wiki can't even get the name of the system correctly, how on earth can they trust the article's contents? 
Simply look at the opening line of the article. It talks about STV being a voting system, so it is explicitly and unambiguously talking about the system, not merely a description of a methodology. It is patently absurd, grammatically ludicrous and amateurish in the extreme to get something as basic as a voting system's name wrong. I know my professor would be roaring with laughter at seeing an encyclopædia getting the name of an internationally used electoral system wrong. I certainly hopes he never looks at that page with its almighty clanger in the title. STÓD/ÉÍRE 01:35 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)
:Then can we at least agree to disagree and move on? This was a borderline case to begin with due to the majority capitalization usage so it isn't something worth arguing much about - I have more important things to do with my time like adding content to Wikipedia. Do what you think is best for this article. --mav
I have treble-checked in political science textbooks, websites and election coverage books. The vast majority capitalise Single Transferable Vote. Indeed wikipedia stands out in having lower case for some references to STV. I've put together a list of just some of the titles, using the exact words used by them. 
*BBC|Proportional Representation|Single Transferable Vote  
*Model Election by Single Transferable Vote 
* STV - Single Transferable Vote
*Preference Voting - Single Transferable Vote  
*Axioms and STV (Single Transferable Vote)  
*How to conduct an election by the Single Transferable Vote 
*Proportional Representation and the Single Transferable Vote  
*The Single Transferable Vote 
*Yahoo Groups : single-transferable-vote The Single Transferable Vote method  
*Single Transferable Vote hand count 
Constitution Debate: Single Transferable Vote and electoral . . . 
As the evidence is so utterly overwhelming, with wikipedia standing out on the page on the net as one of a small minority not to capitalise a page dealing with the voting system (as opposed to methodology, where lower is sometimes used) I am changing the title back to the capitalised version. STÓD/ÉÍRE 02:26 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)
: So is this another American English versus British English issue? Martin
::Those links don't indicate so, some are British and some not. But could someone please hand Stod some valium? It's really not that important, man. Chill out. :) --AW
----
(to Martin) The problem with wiki articles on voting procedure is that, when a number of articles were placed by a group of political scientists (one Aussie, two Brits, one Irish and a couple of Americans) put on a series of pages on voting systems a handful of people swept in, and without knowing what they were doing, merged totally different systems into the one article thinking they were the same, broke up single articles into bits that contradicted each other, mucked up names, changes references, mucked up formulæ and then just when it looked that things couldn't get each other, a particular user who specialises in capitalisation muck ups (ie changing capitalisation in topics he doesn't know the first thing about because some dodgy google search based on a number of nutty websites told him too) swept in and lowercased proper nouns because ludicrously inaccurate web pages told him to. 
As a result there are glaring inaccuracies in terminology, in voting methodology, patently absurd links. One page makes Instant Run-Off sound the same as PR.STV. The PR.STV  page links to STV which is ludicrous; PR.STV uses STV, but so do other systems which have nothing to do with PR. And many systems of PR don't use STV at all. That was once clear but the edits and rewrites and redirects, and capitalisation changes and chop-ups now mean that everything is now blurred into one almightly heap of garbage that is utterly unreliable. But having pleaded with those responsible to stop and been met with "but google says . . ." bullshit none of those to did the original work are going to touch the pages. FearÉIREANN 03:33 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)
: Moving this here, because it seems like potentially useful criticism of this page (and related pages), though not knowing the history myself, I can't really say. Delete if pointless. Martin 00:12, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Question of capitalisation

message: How can we include CPO-STV? Perhaps we should separate this entry into SSTV and STV, which would also link to CPO-STV. Any other ideas? -- ShadowDragon 06:02, 13 Aug 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Linking to it will be easy, getting it written is where the work lies.  I'd like to see a CPO-STV page.  I've seen descriptions of it (google will find one from the EM list) but I've never discovered what the "CPO" stands for. Pm67nz 10:24, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: CPO = Comparison of Pairs of Outcomes -- the whole thing is usually called something like "Comparison of Pairs of Outcomes by the Single Transferable Vote" -- ShadowDragon 23:56, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Inclusion of CPO-STV

message: Although STV was not used in 1949 in British Columbia, it was used in 1952 and 1953:  and . 142.179.125.20 02:22, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: STV in British Columbia

message: I removed this sentence:
:A vote is wasted if it ends up on the last candidate to be eliminated.
This is not true. There can be more than one un-eliminated candiate at the end of the voting process, as long as their total votes are less than the quota.
Ben Arnold 02:23, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Un-eliminated candiates

message: The STV is used for Assembly elections, and European Elections (differing from the rest of the UK) - I beleive STV is also used for local elections. What about the Westminister elections - these don't use STV - do they? I don't know.
STV is such fun to vote with :o) You get such a satisfaction of putting the unlikely people first :o) My own local area had over twice as many candidates as seats - I greatly amused myself weighing up party alignment, and as a final resort, job descriptions!!!
Zoney 23:30, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: STV in Northern Ireland

message: The opening sentence currently says, "The Single Transferable Vote, or STV, is a preference voting system designed to minimise wasted votes in multi-candidate elections while ensuring that votes are explicitly for individuals rather than party lists." However STV is not restricted to the use of choosing people. It could, for instance, be used to choose a flag, or a myriad of other things so I think the language in this article should be changed to reflect this. What do you think? Christiaan 14:13, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the whole article is unduly focused on party politics and really needs to be generalised in a lot of areas. —Christiaan 19:01, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: STV is not just a voting system for people or parties

message: *Can I ask people to focus on the article and not the particular form or virtue of STV, PR or whatever that will solve all known problems in the universe? The article needs serious attention. Throughout the text:
** Headings are misleading.
** Terminology is inconsistent.
** A number of minor topics that should have their own articles are crowded into this one.
** Use of sub-topics, numbering etc is wildly inconsistent.
** I also feel this article lacks a simplistic and easy to understand introduction. It jumps straight into mathematics and complex terminology. Alan
*** I've taken a stab at this, and have moved a lot of the math into a new counting article since most of it isn't quite needed for the main article here.  I'll also add more to the introduction later to make the topic more approachable for novices.  Scott Ritchie 10:19, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleaning up the article 

message: I have removed the following section:
:Critics of the constitutional change, however, argue that the electoral results reflected a strength of STV rather than a deficiency as the system was able to recognise a preference among voters for some charismatic individuals of one party but the party platform of another.  Furthermore, proponents of STV argue that the outcome of an election should not change if the only difference in the ballots is the partisan affiliation of some of the popular candidates, rather than an actual difference in the preferences expressed by the voter.
The problem with this is that there is no evidence that the problems in Malta were caused by a candidate being more popular than their party. This Even those who were very popular saw almost all of their surpluses transfer to other candidates from the same party. Excel table with counts provides the data. --Henrygb 11:03, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Malta 1981

message: Can anyone out there provide any citations that imperiali has ever been used in an STV election, or the rationale for so doing? Droop and Hare both make a sort of sense, but Imperiali is a) arbitrary, and b) I can't see how it could work in STV since it would gaurantee thatan excess of quotas would be filled....--Red Deathy 12:38, 2005 May 11 (UTC)
*Nope. It should be deleted or outlinked to its own article like the Hagenbach-Bischoff quota. Alan 13:32, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Imperiali quota?

message: Is there any actual example of a party using STV to order candidates in List PR systems? This sections strikes me as another case, like the Imperiali quota, where a minor topic gets undue prominence.
*Agreed, it doesn't seem to fit or make much sense.  I'm going to remove it now until someone can provide a source for this actually happening, as it seems unlikely that List PR systems would use STV internally for parties rather than just using STV in the electoral system.  Scott Ritchie 11:58, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ordering candidates in a list system 

message: STV can be used used as a social preference function  to produce an overall ranking of candidates.  For example, closed party-list PR allots seats proportionally to lists and chooses candidates from that list in the order set down on the list. Some parties decide this centrally but others give the choice to the membership.  STV has been used in such elections; in such an election the party members mark their ballots in just the same way as in a normal STV election.  
When the votes come to be counted the same ballots are used first for an STV election to choose one winner, as an instant runoff election; then the same ballots are used to see which two would win when the votes are counted for a two winner election and so on.  The head of the list is the party member who would be elected in the one winner count.  The second place is taken by the next party member who succeeds in the two winner race (in the unusual event that the winner of the single winner count did not succeed in the two winner count, then the first to be elected in the two winner count), and so on.
Scott Ritchie 12:21, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ordering candidates for List PR 

message: The webpage http://stv.sourceforge.net/ makes a reference to "Meek and Warren STV".  I've not had any luck digging up what "Warren STV" is.  Can someone explain?  Should the answer go into the article?  Thanks. TreyHarris 10:05, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: * Ah, thanks.  So, if all voters use preference voting, "Meek and Warren STV" ≡ "Meek STV"?  I read that webpage as saying "Meek and Warren STV" meaning "(Meek STV) + (Warren STV)", not "(Meek + Warren) STV", but it's ambiguous. Given how much moaning I've heard lately on policy pages about how preference voting is a pain, and approval or plurality voting is worth the unfairness just to reduce that pain, perhaps Warren's X-voting method should be mentioned. TreyHarris 21:16, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Warren STV? 

message: Is this method used anywhere?  It's not even clear how it's supposed to work - how do members elected from a multi-member constituency claim "sub-districts" anyway?  I'm nearly certain the countback method (with or without counting exhausted votes) is used instead, as the votes going for a candidate represent "perfect sub-district" exactly. Scott Ritchie 18:04, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It was proposed by Hoag and Hallett. The only use I'm aware of is in some Australian NGOs, mainly student associations and that's my doing (or fault). The way to elect members in the subdistricts was to run a second count with only the winning candidates eligible, and elect the candidate who 'won' the subdistrict if they had not done better in another subdistrict. It's essentially the same as a countback. Both methods are designed to identify the electors who chose the outgoing candidate. The advantage of subdistricts is that it allows for changes of opinion since the general election. I have not read Hoag and Hallett (and don't have a copy to hand) for a while, but I think they said it had been used in some US elections.Alan 00:35, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Subdistricts method of replacements