Wikipedia talk:Conlangs/Old straw poll

Hello. I think it is a little early for opening the vote right now: the discussion is still going on, and I was actually working on a draft proposal based on yours. Once the vote is open, it is pretty hard to change the options. Can we please close the vote for a while and first conclude our discussion? There's no need to remove this page, just put a huge DRAFT above it. --IJzeren Jan 06:54, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

• I tried to be inclusive, because (obviously) not every option would be approved... I'll add your notice to it (good idea, too). Almafeta 13:08, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
• Also, I'd like every section to have a page discussion that nominated criteria... I'll start work on that. Almafeta 18:19, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

Vote problems?

The vote counting procedure outlined on the Votes page has a problem. Suppose a given criterion has 13 Major votes, 10 Minor, and 7 Oppose. By the procedure above, 23 > 7 so it gets in (good), and 13 > 10 so it becomes a major criterion. But 17 out of 30 people thought it should not be a major criterion. I think we need an instant run-off system. If none of the three options gets an outright majority, the votes for the third-place option would be redistributed:

• if Major comes third, Major votes are added to Minor votes for the second round
• if Oppose comes third, Oppose votes are added to Minor votes for the second round
• if Minor comes third, Minor votes are redistributed according to the voters' explicit second preference (Oppose or Major), where expressed; votes with no second preference expressed are added to Oppose for the second round.

I think that, or something like it, would give fairer results for criteria with close votes.

We might also want to add a meta-category to the voting: How many Minor criteria should be required to equal one Major criterion? Two, three, four...? --Jim Henry | Talk 11:33, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

I'm really not following your proposed runoff system, nor your problem... In the example you gave, the majority said to include it, and the plurality of all voters (and the majority of those who supported it) said to make it major. I'm really not seeing a possible problem.

Let me try to explain again. Those who voted Minor had their reasons for not voting Major; that is, they don't think that this criterion merits inclusion by itself. And those voting Oppose obviously thought the same, and more strongly: if does not even help toward inclusion, it certainly doesn't merit inclusion by itself. So a slight majority (17 out of 30) thought that this criterion did not merit inclusion by itself, yet with your proposed simple plurality system, it becomes a Major criterion.

Here's another hypothetical vote count: 9 Major, 7 Minor, 14 Oppose. Again, by your system it would become a Major criterion, in this case with 21 out of 30 voters thinking it should not be a major criterion — a more than two-thirds majority opposing its Major status. With my instant run-off system, the 14 Oppose votes would be added to the 7 Minor votes in the second round, giving 21 for Minor and 9 for Major, so it would become a Minor criterion. --Jim Henry | Talk 23:56, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

The thing is, your system would throw many major criteria into minor criteria, when more people want to see it as a major criteria than a minor criteria.

...but only if a fairly large minority opposed it entirely. I see the Major voters and Minor voters as allied in wanting the criterion to count in some way, and the Minor voters and Oppose voters allied in wanting it not to qualify a conlang for conclusion all by itself. Your system could make some criteria Major when more people opposed them entirely than wanted them to be Major. --Jim Henry | Talk 14:12, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

Here's another example: 4 Major, 2 Minor, 3 Oppose. Under your system of automatic opposition, you would remove a criteria that the majority (4/7) thought should be a major criteria. Almafeta 23:13, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

• Umm, that's 4 out of 9, which isn't a majority, not 4 out of 7. I believe that the minor votes should be combined with the major votes to determine if it'll be a criteria at all, but with the oppose votes to determine if it becomes a major criteria. The way you've set the vote up biases it against minor criteria. Furthermore, as I read the page, a 50%+1 vote is going to be enough for something to pass. My understanding of the way Wikipedia typically works is that anything less than a 60 or 70% supermajority is unlikely to cut it for validating policies or guidelines, or any other decision, really. I believe both problems will undermine if not fully negate the legitimacy of any decision based on this vote. The Literate Engineer 23:40, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Jim Henry that the vote-counting system is flawed. I don't think anything should be able to become a major criterion unless it has a majority of the total votes, on the grounds that an oppose vote also means "if this has to be a criterion, it should be a minor one". Adding the major to minor works fine to establish something as a minor criterion, but establishing major criteria should require a more stringent standard than mere plurality. The Literate Engineer 18:19, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

I concur. Also, if any of the "At least N independent discussions of the language" and the "Has a sufficiently large vocabulary" criteria should pass, N shouldn't be calculated as the average of the non-oppose votes, since the oppose votes ought to be treated as N=infinite. N ought to be the lowest number that has a majority behind it. / Alarm 17:22, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Also, we'll only want to vote on how many minor criteria are necessary when we know how many criteria there are... I anticipated that, but I think that we can leave that vote for another day, if it's necessary. Almafeta 11:40, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

OK, that sort of makes sense. Does that mean we already plan on having a second vote (on how many Minor criteria are required to equal one Major one) begin the day after the first vote is concluded? The number of Minor criteria that get approval in the voting could, indeed, affect how many minor criteria people think should be required for inclusion. I'm not sure what you mean by "if it's necessary": surely a list of minor criteria is not much help without an explicit policy about how many of them are required to merit inclusion for a language that has no major criterion fulfilled? --Jim Henry | Talk 23:56, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Human common sense is still going to be required in the creation of any article, criteria or no criteria. I'm leaving things to be defined later, if needed; that includes how many minor criteria equal a major. Almafeta 03:51, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

Ambiguous phrasing of questions

Has a public corpus of at least 10,000 words: Firstly, is that comma separating thousands or decimals? Secondly, if the former, is this meant to be a lexicon, with 10 000 different words (in case my vote stands) or one or more texts consisting of in total 10 000 tokens, including duplicates? In that case, I need to change my vote. If the latter is the case, doesn't that mean that there is no lexicon-size criteria at all? I'd vote for that as a minor criteria. Same for the one with 100 or 100 000 words. Kaleissin 12:08:19, 2005-08-29 (UTC), who finds it fascinating how conlangs are judged harsher than natlangs

The way I understand it, the question refers to the total number of words in all text written in the language, including translations. Every occurrence of a word counts of course separately; otherwise it would become extremely hard to count the words. All this has nothing to do with lexicon size; a separate question about that is formulated a little further down.

BTW, as I mentioned in the text, I find it pretty hard to work with absolutes here. A polysynthetic language consists of far fewer (but also much longer) words than an isolation language. --IJzeren Jan 12:26, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

If you look at the discussion on the other pages, it's clear that "corpus" means the total amount of text written in the language. There is another criterion, "Has a sufficiently large vocabulary", which asks support voters to specify a minimum size for the lexicon, which numbers will be averaged if that criterion passes. Although, as IJzeren Jan points out, comparing word counts in either the corpus or the lexicon for languages of different types (isolating, synthetic, polysynthetic) is problematic. --Jim Henry | Talk 14:40, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

On the concept of notability

Note: I was taking some time writing this. In the meantime admin Kim Bruning deleted the vote page (but not this talk page), citing, in the edit summary Wikipedia is not a democracy. That could be considered a more brute way of saying what I'm trying to say below. I believe the following is relevant to a continued discussion, so I'm posting it anyway.

I know there's been a discussion leading up to this "vote" (which strangely does not seem to be linked from this page) so I guess I can be blamed for not taking part in it. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that this discussion has mostly seen people who are involved with conlangs take part. In some cases I believe they might have a limited familiarity with the principles, policies and procedures of Wikipedia. (I want to make it clear that I'm by no means a veteran user myself.) This thesis is strenghened by the rather nonstandard procedure by which this is being done. My understanding is that guidelines are generally not voted on but reached through discussion. Even what seems to be "votes" are often discussions, where people are allowed, even encouraged, to explain the reasoning, and where the discussion continues until a conclusion is reached. On this page, participants are asked to "vote" without any further discussion. But you guys can't really say "sorry, too late" to people that haven't taken an interest in the issue until now.

While I'll willingly admit it would have been better if I had raised these objections earlier, I believe they need to be raised. Remember that under the current rules, guidelines are simply guidelines, and whether or not an article is kept depends on a consensus decision involving the whole community, over on Votes for Deletion. If some of these criteria pass, I'm afraid that languages that meet them will be deleted anyway.

My major point is that most Wikipedians define notability roughly as a verifiable impact on the world around the subject at hand. Conlangs only published on the web or not at all, however large their vocabulary and however complete their grammar, are comparable to unpublished book manuscripts, or a demo CD by a garage band without a recording contract (cf WP:MUSIC). However extensive, groundbreaking or beautiful, those novels and demo CDs would not survive a Votes for Deletion debate. (Having been discussed on a mailing list won't help.) Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information - in this case, Wikipedia is not a conlang database with some inclusion restrictions as to minimal size of vocabulary and/or corpus.

Also, note that the No original research policy states that articles should not include "facts, opinions, or argument" that haven't been previously "published by a credible or reputable publication". This makes it hard to base criteria for inclusion on mailing list discussions alone. It also means that only a published statement about whether or not a language has "caused controversy", achieves "challenging artistic goals" or has an "extreme grammar or vocabulary" can be quoted in an article and thus form the basis of criteria for inclusion.

So do I have any better suggestions? Well, I think this vote is premature and the discussion needs to be revisisted, with wider participation, in order to find criteria that can attain community-wide consensus. / Alarm 20:33, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

The previous discussion is linked from this page; it's on Wikipedia:Conlangs and various subpages. In particular, the discussion on Wikipedia:Conlangs/Notability, verifiability, merit, completeness covers most of the points you raised here. We're trying to make the general Wikpedia policy on notability and verifiability more specific to conlangs and more quantifiable. (That discussion is where the "At least N independent discussions" criterion came from, for instance.) I agree that a lot of the proposed criteria are irrelevant to notability and verifiability, which is why I voted Oppose on them.

It's true that the people involved in the discussion seem mostly to be people who were previously involved in editing various conlang articles or voting on conlang article VfDs and VfUDs -- that's where we announced that we were discussing this draft policy proposal. Maybe we need to extend the discussion/poll a while longer now that more people have gotten involved? --Jim Henry | Talk 20:55, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

I think the size of the corpus written in a language is relevant to that language's notability. If no one creates any works in the language, it is seemingly unused, it's impact is comparatively small. Furthermore, the size of corpus is verifiable. By no means do i think that we should set a minimum corpus for inclusion in wikipedia, but it is harder to argue a language is not notable if it's large corpus verifies that it is well-used. Intangir 22:30, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

As noted before in various places on Wikipedia:Conlangs and subpages, the proposed criteria are inclusive, not exclusive. That is, any conlang that meets the criteria is presumed to be notable and verifiable; if it doesn't meet one criterion, it might meet another. So having a large corpus shows a conlang is notable, but not having a large corpus doesn't prove it's not notable; it might be notable for any of several other reasons. The reasoning behind this whole policy proposal debate is to have something more specific to point at when a conlang is nominated for deletion; if a conlang has a 100K word corpus or 100 speakers or whatever, it would then (assuming some form of this draft eventually becomes Wikipedia policy) be up to the nominator to argue why the conlang is nonetheless non-notable. --Jim Henry | Talk 22:57, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Refactor.

I've refactored this to be more in line with policies (precis: votes, or binding polls, are banned from Wikipedia in all circumstances except Board elections, which are hardly relevent to policy).

And no, I didn't do a search-and-replace, something must have just borked itself somewhere. We actually won't "count" the "votes", because (a) there are no votes, and (b) we don't count, we consider and seek consensus. I hope that I haven't distressed any of you with this revelation of policy. :-)

James F. (talk) 23:17, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that the word vote necessarily means the same thing as a binding poll. Merriam Webster defines it as

"1 a : a usually formal expression of opinion or will in response to a proposed decision; especially : one given as an indication of approval or disapproval of a proposal, motion, or candidate for office "

Nothing about the definition implies that it must be binding.

Furthermore, M-W defines poll as

" 4 a (1) : the casting or recording of the votes of a body of persons (2) : a counting of votes cast b : the place where votes are cast or recorded -- usually used in plural <at the polls> c : the period of time during which votes may be cast at an election d : the total number of votes recorded <a heavy poll>"

All of the definitions for poll specifically state that people voted.

While straw poll is definitely a more precise word to use, the word vote is not wrong, only imprecise. Intangir 23:28, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree -- even within the context of a straw poll, it is perfectly good usage to refer to the individual indications of opinion as "votes" and the analysis of the poll results as "vote counting". Avoiding the word "vote" leads to unwieldy expressions. --Jim Henry | Talk 23:36, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Please note that my definitions are of the terms of art of Wikipedia, and not of the general meaning of words in whatever variant of English you happen to speak. Given that, I would disagree that people do not generally expect something called a "vote" to be non-binding.

James F. (talk) 23:41, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Maybe not, but do they necessarily expect it to be binding? Intangir 23:50, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Good catch of an apparent hole in my logic :-); yes, I would say that they do.

James F. (talk) 00:21, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

I think you're probably right, at least for that collective noun form. But when people talk about their vote or the act of voting I think it they often mean it merely as an expression of opinion. I think that vote is, infact, more correct than the word opinion in this context, but only as a matter of excessively nitpicky semantics. We are talking about expressions of opinions and not opinions themselves. Intangir 00:54, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

RfC

I highly suggest an RfC against User:Kim Bruning. I would support such a thing. Agriculture 23:43, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Unilaterally deleting this page was annoying, as was his response to people's responses, but if it's the first serious breach of wiki etiquette he's guilty of, I would hesitate to start such proceedings. I've never had dealings with him before now, so I don't know how he behaves generally. --Jim Henry | Talk 23:58, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

While User:Kim_Bruning is typically a good admin, this shows a serious breach of NPOV and WP:POINT as well as admin abuse. I won't start the RfC, but I'd support it. Agriculture 00:00, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Actually my mistake was that I didn't catch this earlier (which would have allowed a more gentle handeling of the situation), for which I apologise. Sorry about that ^^; .

Voting is definately against policy though. Perhaps starting an RFC would call attention to the problem, and might get more people to pay attention. Kim Bruning 00:58, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

No, voting is most definitely not against policy. WP:NOT a democracy does not mean one cannot hold a vote or a poll, it just says they cannot be the sole detemination of policy. Votes and polls are most certainly allowed and can be very positive. They allow one to force a discussion in a clear way, with both sides stating reasons for and against. Afterwards the voting helps to show if a consensus has been reached, and if so, what the consensus was. Unless you advocate an autocratic admin ruled Wikipedia, voting will always have a place here and will never be against policy. Agriculture 01:05, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

No actually, I advocate neither a democracy nor an admin ruled wikipedia. In fact it is not up to me to advocate anything, the nature of the wiki is simply such that it's designed for a different system.

It's often quite funny to see dictatorships use western designed equipment, material, and software, and then fail miserably. This is because the equipment was designed to operate in an open, democratic society. The premise(s) the equipment was/were based on simply do not exist under dictatorship.

In the same way, wikis have been designed to work on the internet, and they're designed to support a method of working together based on community consensus and good faith. Trying to use a wiki in a different system is doomed to failure.

People who come to wikipedia often don't realise this basic concept at first, and try to force their own views onto the system. Some fail and leave; some become embittered; some finally learn. Up until now though, the majority has always been that of "sane" users who already came from internet and other consensus based systems, or their numbers have been small enough that there was always someone around who could "show them the ropes" so they could learn from the mistakes of the past.

Currently a strange thing is happening: there is more inflow than can be handled by the community, and people aren't learning the wiki-basics anymore.

I'm very concerned, but am unsure what can be done about it. Kim Bruning 01:19, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

You seem to have trouble separating your own POV of what Wiki is, and what it actually is. Your POV is that voting has no place and doesn't work. Wikipedia doesn't seem to agree. Voting is a long standing part of Wikipedia. Voting is a tool used to form consensus. Furthermore the notion that Wiki's are designed to work on the internet via "good faith" shows a certain amount of ignorance of what the internet really is. Studies have shown the internet does not breed good faith, but sociopathic behavior due to the extreme anonimity.

Voting is a way to get people on topic in a discussion of consensus, it's not a tool to democratically decide things, and it is most certainly permitted. Agriculture 01:26, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

The pages you mentioned are polls, not votes. What was being held here was a vote. See the previous section where JamesF explains the distinction. Kim Bruning 01:30, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

September comes to all popular internet phenomena eventually, Kim. The users of USENET learned to deal with it, so can you and wikipedia. --Kaleissin Tue Sep 4382 10:34:35 UTC 1993

Not to be mean here Kim, but you're just playing word games here. You lost to public opinion so you're allowing a poll to stand, but polls and votes are the same thing. Agriculture 01:37, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

No, polls and votes are not the same thing. Pay close attention to what JamesF is saying here. (namely, that they are specific words of the art of Wikipedia) Kim Bruning 01:41, 30 August 2005 (UTC) (Note that good faith is a prerequisite for a wiki, and not for the internet at large of course, though really old internet software did assume it at one point in time.)

Poll and vote are synonymns. Don't talk down to me Kim. Just because you personally, or perhaps JamesF believes the words mean a certain thing doesn't mean they do. If that was true, then why not Speedy Delete VfD and VfU? Seriously Kim, put your money where your mouth is. If you truly believe this, either Speedy VfD and VfU, or move them to PfD and PfU and lets see what the consensus of Wikipedia is. They aren't words in the "art of Wikipedia", they're words in the English language and a long tradition of Wiki. As far as good faith, yes we all remember what life was like before AOL, and it wasn't good faith, it was trolls, flames, and anonymous asshats, just like it is now. Agriculture 02:02, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

I can't help you if you claim they're the same, they really aren't! As to your dare, people are way ahead of you there. :-) See Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion#Name change (again): VFD will probably move to Articles for Deletion, and VfU to Deletion Review. This is a bigger move than most people realised though, so it'll take a little while to do. Note that Ed Poor tried to speedy VfD already, but there was no replacement system in place at the time, so people had to regretfully put it back for the time being. Kim Bruning 02:10, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Kim, are you claiming you know more than the publishers of dictionaries? [1] [2]. Agriculture 03:05, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Like JamesF said above, they're words of the art: wikipedia jargon if you will. Dictionaries typically don't publish highly specific jargon.

Note 1: Also see: Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Majoritarianism, where parts of this debate are being held, in case you've missed it.

Note 2: Wrt internet software using good faith, I was thinking of MTAs being configured to permit relaying of mail to all comers (something which nowadays would be exploited by spammers), or somewhat later where telnet and ftp still allowed plaintext passwords, (which assumes good faith wrt the connecting network at least). Kim Bruning 03:39, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

No one said that voting had to mean majoritism, although lets face it, thats what consensus means anyway. Votes help to show the common opinion.

Actually consensus means consensus. We really do not vote. (see also the discussion at WP:NOT, referenced above, where several people exlain that to greater depth). What you're describing now sounds a bit more like a poll. Kim Bruning

Wrt good faith on the net - We can all see why those protocals failed. Good faith is ruined by slashdotters, AOL'ers, and other forms of asshats and faceless trolls. Agriculture 03:42, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Yeah. I hope you don't count yourself under one of those categories. I figure you're a good person, and that you mean well. :-) Kim Bruning 04:00, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

There seems to be a small clique of people who have been aggressively trying to remove all conlangs from Wikipedia of late. First one person started a whole series of VfD's against conlangs, all with the words "non-notable, conlang." Note the position of the comma - this user was not implying that those conlangs were non-notable, but that all conlangs were. Then an administrator applied an ex post facto edits limit to those votes, consequently skewing them in favour of deletion. This person is quoted as having written "Destroy all micronations and their conlangs." Finally a third person unilaterally deletes the votes page from the policy forming discussion, despite the fact that nobody involved in this discussion had objected to this method of forming consensus. I'm new to Wikipedia, and I understand that the etiquette is to assume good faith, but with regard to these people I feel that

1. There is evidence contrary to the assumption.
2. They have not assumed good faith about me.

Pete Bleackley --132.185.132.12 13:30, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

However, neither Kim nor I (nor any of the other long-time sysops who are shouting at you all to stop using votes becaused they're banned on Wikipedia) could give a toss whether or not they are included, quite frankly. :-) The issues you are reporting are wholly unrelated. Honest.

James F. (talk) 16:24, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Alternative proposal

Since we are having a time-out now and the votes already made will in all likeliness be discarded anyway, I have taken the liberty to come with an alternative questionnaire. That is, with a proposal largely based on the current one, with a few additions that were neglected earlier, and reorganised into something slightly more systematic. I wanted to do that earlier, but reasons of health and time withheld me from doing so. Anyway, here it is. Comments are sollicited on the talk page. --IJzeren Jan 10:06, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

I consider this a better proposal, if for no other reason that it uses a better layout, so do take a look. --Kaleissin 13:56:26, 2005-08-30 (UTC)

Alright, what are we going to do?

Six days ago, the vote was opened. Two days later, the page was suddenly deleted and shortly after restored. We decided to mull over things a bit before reopening the vote, and not call it "vote" but "poll" instead. Since that moment, some people have abstained from voting anyway, others haven't. Things are getting a little messy, especially because it's not really made clear that the poll is stalled at the moment.

So, what are we going to do about it?

It doesn't look like anyone has much more to contribute to the discussion. In other words, before people forget about this little project, we might as well officially reopen the poll (or better, announce that it will be open from, say, 11 through 18 September.

I still propose to use my alternative proposal as a basis for a new questionnaire. Like I said, I think it's a little more systematic and easier to use than the current one (all my reasons are explained on the same page). If y'all agree, I'll prepare a new voting form based on it.

The votes that have already been issued will probably have to be discarded. The best thing I can think of is that we invite anyone who participated to come and vote again.

Before we start a new vote/poll, we should make it very clear how the votes are counted (how consensus is reached).

Comments? --IJzeren Jan 20:07, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

I agree; you should make a new poll form based on your alternative proposal and the comments it's gotten from me and others, and specify how votes will be counted in the poll (based on the discussion here earlier); then announce the poll will be open starting a week or so from now. --Jim Henry | Talk 14:14, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

Good to have you back! Okay, I'll get around to that tomorrow! Cheers, --IJzeren Jan 14:49, 6 September 2005 (UTC)