User talk:Progressnerd

Welcome to Wikipedia! I see that you have been editing since June 2007, with a total of 17 edits until now, almost all of them dealing with voting systems issues. Perhaps you would be interested in WP:WikiProject Voting Systems.

The occasion for my initiation of your Talk page is this edit made by you to Instant-runoff voting:. You have popped more or less into the middle of a bit of an edit war, due to a need to suddenly incorporate large amounts of material about controversy over IRV from another article, Instant-runoff voting controversies, which was redirected to Instant-runoff voting after a Merge decision was made at Articles for deletion/Instant-runoff voting controversies (2nd nomination). If you wish to see the original article, here is History for it: you can pick a version and read it, and the Talk page is still in place at [].

Your edit removed some reliably sourced material; generally, you should avoid doing that without discussion. You also made a point about "drop-off" occurring in both the first and second round of a two-round election, when, of course, that term would never be used, and I've never seen a reference to "first round drop-off" or whatever it would be called. Of course, turnout between any two elections is going to vary. If you are aware of any studies of the significance of this, you'd be most welcome to bring them to the table, either in Talk or directly with edits. To this point, what we have in this section of the article is a FairVote document about Federal primaries (none of these, primary or runoff, were held with the general election, which is the issue). FairVote is a problematic source, but I have no reason to doubt this study, so for now I've left it. It did not support the point you made. Then there are Cary election results from 2003, which simply showed an example of a primary with the same turnout, approximately, as the runoff, and a reference to the San Francisco Voter Information Pamphlet for Proposition A in 2002, which passed RCV there. This particular piece, which you removed with the Cary reference, is the most on-point in the subsection, actually, because it was argument being notably made on the subsection topic, and the section is about controversies, about arguments being made for or against IRV.

Instant-runoff voting has suffered from low editor participation. While I am a bit concerned about an apparent single-purpose account appearing suddenly as you did with the particular content you restored, my hope is that your participation with the article can help us all to improve it, to make it neutral and complete, and hopefully to move it to Featured Article status. We have many obstacles to face, and many hands make light work. Please try to discuss possibly controversial edits in article Talk. Thanks, --Abd (talk) 23:31, 26 May 2008 (UTC)