Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Voter decision support system


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. The crucial point is that the article is completely unsourced. Contested unsourced material must go, per the core policy WP:V. If yomebody wants to work on this they can request draftification via WP:REFUND.  Sandstein  11:36, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Voter decision support system

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

Subject does not meet WP:GNG. Virtually all of the content in the article is about the related concept (and various kinds) of decision support systems, as well as the definitions of various terms that are (presumably) relevant to discussions of voter decision support systems, but are not explicitly tied to them (for example, there's sections on "Workflow" and "note-taking" which just describe those two concepts with no connection to voter support systems. The phrase "Voter decision support system", however, appears to have only ever been used in the paper "Voter-centered design: Toward a voter decision support system." by Scott P Robertson, and I can find no other coverage of the subject online. Citrivescence tagged the article with notability and proposed a merge to Decision support system, but I'm honestly not sure there's anything here worth merging. signed,Rosguill talk 22:28, 1 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Reads like OR, and the article's content does not support the concept of a voter support system per nom. Reywas92Talk 20:41, 2 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment I tagged it as a merge because the phrase is mentioned in decision support systems and as a new page reviewer, that's the typical course of action when a topic exists elsewhere. However, I am not at all opposed to deletion as I think there is too much jargon for the page to be easily comprehended by laymen. So, delete.Citrivescence (talk) 22:04, 2 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Do Not Delete To the WP:GNG point, I would like to indicate that there exists a W3C Voter Decision Support Community Group (https://www.w3.org/community/voter-decision-support/) which is advancing Web standards and schemas in support of the development of voter decision support systems and related technologies. I tidied up the article as well. do not delete signed,AdamSobieski talk —Preceding undated comment added 15:11, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete Draftify: This could be a valuable article someday if the phrase and concept gains more traction (i.e. notability), but right now it appears to be too soon for an article. As noted above, "Voter-centered design: toward a voter decision support system" by Scott P. Robertson is the only published source. The Voter Decision Support Community Group that User:AdamSobieski mentioned above was created only a little over a month ago (November 27, 2018) after a proposal by Adam Sobieski himself; the group has not yet published any documents, and a note on the group's page advises: "Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff." And User:AdamSobieski created this article a month before Adam Sobieski proposed the group, so even in relation to that group the creation of this article was "jumping the gun". In summary: Too soon. Biogeographist (talk) 15:56, 3 January 2019 (UTC) Changed from delete to draftify; see rationale below. Biogeographist (talk) 23:00, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment There are now two sources for the concept: (1) a 2005 publication by Scott P. Robertson and (2) a W3C Community Group originating in 2018 which indicates that scientific discussion and standardization work are underway on the topics. I would also like to indicate that a number of other scholarly publications (roughly 27) cite the Robertson publication: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=17559862892532144697&as_sdt=5,36&sciodt=0,36&hl=en . With regard to too soon, the hyperlinked-to explanation of that Wikipedia policy item doesn't seem to include scientific topics; users may hope to find fresh scientific, specifically computer scientific, articles on Wikipedia. science freshly delivered signed,AdamSobieski talk —Preceding undated comment added 16:31, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
 * WP:Too soon is not a policy, just commentary on implications of the notability guidelines, but it certainly applies to articles on research topics too: "This applies to recent events, people, new products and any other topics about which facts have only recently emerged or are still emerging." Regarding the other sources that are listed on Google Scholar as citing Robertson's article: When we subtract the articles that are just Robertson citing himself and subtract the articles that are not about voter decision support systems, how many sources are left? It would be helpful if you could list here the sources that you think are relevant. Regarding the group, which as I mentioned is only a little over a month old, it does not tell us anything except that eight people are interested in the group. We still don't have significant coverage in reliable secondary sources. See also: WP:NOTEVERYTHING, WP:NOTADVOCACY, WP:NOTNEWS. Biogeographist (talk) 17:14, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment Why would we want to subtract the articles which cite Robertson which were authored by Robertson or by Robertson with others? Each article citing Robertson's 2005 article was a peer-reviewed scientific article and the entirety of the set appeared across a number of scientific publication venues. It is unclear why we would want to dismiss Robertson's articles which cite the 2005 Robertson article: "Voter-centered design: Toward a voter decision support system." signed,AdamSobieski talk —Preceding undated comment added 17:25, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
 * If some of those articles by Robertson citing himself are relevant then go ahead and cite them; my point was that simply pointing out that Google Scholar lists 27 publications citing that article by Robertson does not tell us anything about how relevant each publication is to the notability of this article's subject. Google Scholar "cited by" statistics are often inflated by scholars citing their own work for tangential reasons. Take the first two examples of publications by Robertson that cite that source by Robertson: "Online video 'friends' social networking: overlapping online public spheres in the 2008 US presidential election" and "Digital government": they are not relevant to this deletion discussion. Wikipedia already has articles on social networking and digital government. Biogeographist (talk) 18:00, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
 * If you think you have sufficient sources to prove notability, you could just use those sources to improve the article now and then comment here pointing out the improvements that you made. I would happily change my !vote given sufficient evidence, but right now the article is a completely unreferenced orphan, and the arguments made in the deletion discussion do not support keeping the article. Biogeographist (talk) 18:10, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Below, I indicate publications which include the 2005 Robertson publication and an initial set of relevant others which cite that publication:


 * 1) Robertson, Scott P. "Voter-centered design: Toward a voter decision support system." ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 12, no. 2 (2005): 263-292.
 * 2) Redlawsk, David P., and Richard R. Lau. "Behavioral decision-making." In The Oxford handbook of political psychology. 2013.
 * 3) Watkins, Jennifer H., and Marko A. Rodriguez. "A survey of web-based collective decision making systems." In Evolution of the Web in Artificial Intelligence Environments, pp. 243-277. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008.
 * 4) Robertson, Scott P., Christine E. Wania, and S. Joon Park. "An observational study of voters on the internet." In System Sciences, 2007. HICSS 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on, pp. 90-90. IEEE, 2007.
 * 5) Robertson, Scott P., Palakorn Achananuparp, James L. Goldman, Sang Joon Park, Nan Zhou, and Matthew J. Clare. "Voting and political information gathering on paper and online." In CHI'05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1753-1756. ACM, 2005.
 * 6) Robertson, Scott P., Christine E. Wania, George Abraham, and S. Joon Park. "Drop-Down Democracy: Internet Portal Design Influences Voters? Search Strategies." In hicss, p. 191. IEEE, 2008.
 * 7) Robertson, Scott P., Ravi Vatrapu, and George Abraham. "Note taking and note sharing while browsing campaign information." In 2009 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 1-10. IEEE, 2009.
 * 8) Robertson, Scott P. "Digital deliberation: searching and deciding about how to vote." In Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Digital government research, pp. 195-196. Digital Government Society of North America, 2006.


 * signed,AdamSobieski talk —Preceding undated comment added 18:14, 3 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment: Looking at the list of publications above, I noticed the phrase "political information gathering" in the title of one of Robertson's other publications. A search for that phrase on Google Scholar turns up more potential sources. The larger topic of "political information gathering" or "deciding about how to vote" (another phrase from one of Robertson's titles) does seem extremely important. Are there other terms for the same idea? Which term would be most appropriate for an article on this topic? Should this article be moved to Political information gathering or to Voter decision support (without the "system" since political information gathering by many voters may not be very systemic)? Then computer systems for supporting that process could be a subsection of the article on the larger topic of "deciding about how to vote" (or whatever it's called). Biogeographist (talk) 18:38, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
 * It sounds good to me to move the article to either Political information gathering or Voter decision support (or something similar) as a subtopic of the new article, the subtopic of technology supporting voters in their decision-making processes. I'm thinking about Voter decision support (or something similar) with information gathering as a subtopic of decision-making processes. signed,AdamSobieski talk —Preceding undated comment added 20:16, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
 * These sound like good ideas, but it seems like there's a decent amount of further work and discussion to be had in order to determine the best way to present this material. In the interest of being able to close this AfD discussion, would people be amenable to draftifying the article while these changes are being made? signed,Rosguill talk 21:55, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I support draftifying to Draft:Voter decision support, and I changed my !vote above accordingly. (Note that the current article has two redirects that will have to be taken care of after draftifying.) The lead would change accordingly from: "Voter decision support systems are software systems designed to support voters in gathering relevant information, evaluating that information and deciding between alternatives" to something like: "Voter decision support is the design and use of systems to support voters in gathering gathering relevant information, evaluating that information and deciding between alternatives". The key change here is from a focus on the systems as products, which (correct me if I'm wrong) don't actually exist yet, to the conceptualization and design of such systems, which is already happening (described in a subsection of the key 2005 Robertson paper as "Expanding the vision of voter support"). The best approach to writing the article is probably a historical one, describing who invented the term (apparently Robertson), the antecedents in research on voter political information gathering and decision-making, and current directions in development of the field. Review articles would probably be the closest thing to a reliable secondary source on this topic. But have any good review articles on the topic been published since the 2005 Robertson paper? We have a set of articles on related topics, yes, but do we have good review articles that tie enough of that research together in a way that would allow us to write a Wikipedia article that is more than a stub but not plagiarism of Robertson and not original research? Biogeographist (talk) 23:00, 3 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete Just because someone proposes an idea in an academic paper, does not mean we need an encyclopedia article on the topic. No significant coverage in independent sources. --Pontificalibus 09:54, 6 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment The self-citation of a person's own works is taken in the academic world as more likely to be a sign of puffery and promotionalism, rather than importance; they are always omitted from citation counts. For a journal to permit this beyond the necessary links to prior work is generally taken as a sign of low quality peer review.   DGG ( talk ) 04:55, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Draftify WP is not for the presentation or promotion of new academic work; we wait until they arewell established or commented on by others. "TOOSOON" is a restatement of a critical part of the basic policy WP:NOT, and is applicable here also. I'm a little dubious about even draftification at this point.  DGG ( talk ) 04:57, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment Toward discussing technology topics in a broader article on the topics of voter decision support and political information gathering, I also found these publications. According to Google Scholar, the first publication is cited by 624 publications and the second by 925.
 * 1) Kaye, Barbara K., and Thomas J. Johnson. "Online and in the know: Uses and gratifications of the web for political information." Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 46, no. 1 (2002): 54-71.
 * 2) Lau, Richard R., and David P. Redlawsk. How voters decide: Information processing in election campaigns. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
 * signed,AdamSobieski talk —Preceding undated comment added 05:56, 7 January 2019 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.