Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Abortion article titles

Requests

Request of closing admins

HJ Mitchell, Black Kite, and EyeSerene: As has come up in discussion repeatedly, one of the greatest challenges in this whole process has been the pattern of editors starting with the idea that these two articles are "our abortion articles", whatever that means to that individual, and seeing the titles as just labels to be placed on a vague presumed scope that varies dramatically from person to person. Contrariwise, I and others have been at pains in this RFC to bring home the point that, per WP:TITLE, title sets topic and scope, and that we are choosing these articles' scope here, not just labeling a fuzzy pre-set scope. Nonetheless, it is easy to foresee that, however this RFC is resolved, people who begin implementing it by editing the articles in a fashion consistent with their new scope (because their current content is not consistent with any of the possible scopes) will face a lot of mind-numbing resistance from editors who believe that the articles' scope is whatever notion they have in their heads, not that set by the articles' titles. Therefore, I beg you, please, please include language in your closing statement that specifically reinforces WP:TITLE's mandate that title determines scope, so that editors have something specifically, clearly and authoritatively about this situation to point to for backup. Thanks for your consideration. —chaos5023 (talk) 15:43, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Well said, and seconded. (It would also be good to make this clear at this stage, by formulating an explicit voting question that "improves on" the question as originally phrased by ArbCom.)--Victor Yus (talk) 15:53, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

@Chaos, If this is a problem, it isn't helped by the watchlist notice, which says "The RFC on the abortion article names as requested by the Arbitration Committee is now open for voting by the community. Please consider providing your opinion." Perhaps it should say "The RFC on the title of two abortion-related articles, as requested by the Arbitration Committee, is now open for voting by the community. Please consider providing your opinion." Yaris678 (talk) 14:46, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Ugh, yes, good point. I wish I had the faintest idea who to talk to about that. —chaos5023 (talk) 14:51, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

I've just made a request at MediaWiki talk:Watchlist-details#"Abortion article" watchlist notice. There's a bit more info on the whole watchlist notice thing at Wikipedia:Watchlist notices. Yaris678 (talk) 17:52, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Thank bunches! —chaos5023 (talk) 15:13, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Tally

I'm working on a raw tally. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Am3BsUGKovVvdDN4d2M2dVlVWnVpZ2lNWUNDZkhhM2c ... more to follow. Homunq (talk) 17:13, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

OK, I have the raw borda results in the form suggested by yaris678. I do NOT ENDORSE using this counting method, but it was the one which was announced, so here it is (option:points):

1:1380

2:1225.5

3:999

4:973

5:1084.5

6:1088

7:967

8:870.5

9:959

10:1002

11:874

12:1183

13:829.5

14:920.5

15:706

I took the liberty of tallying an additional option 15, which is votes I read as endorsing 12+4+1 as suggested by 20040302.

Again, this is a VERY BAD voting system but it's what was announced. Further tallies of saner voting systems in a few minutes. Homunq (talk) 19:03, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

OK, here's the Condorcet matrix. The Condorcet winner is option 2, which beats option 1 by a (statistically insignificant) total of two votes. The runners up are options 1, then 12, and then a tie between 4 and 5.

net (row beats column - column beats row) totals:
00	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15
1	0	-2	20	17	25	15	24	27	22	22	22	13	27	21	34
2	2	0	18	21	19	23	28	27	26	27	29	4	27	24	30
3	-20	-18	0	-5	-2	-4	4	5	2	0	5	-18	7	4	16
4	-17	-21	5	0	0	-2	8	11	6	4	11	-16	13	8	18
5	-25	-19	2	0	0	-5	6	8	7	5	8	-11	11	9	19
6	-15	-23	4	2	5	0	15	18	15	13	18	-7	17	13	21
7	-24	-28	-4	-8	-6	-15	0	12	1	3	10	-13	11	5	15
8	-27	-27	-5	-11	-8	-18	-12	0	-9	-11	0	-17	3	-2	16
9	-22	-26	-2	-6	-7	-15	-1	9	0	-4	9	-16	8	2	15
10	-22	-27	0	-4	-5	-13	-3	11	4	0	9	-15	8	2	15
11	-22	-29	-5	-11	-8	-18	-10	0	-9	-9	0	-17	7	-1	14
12	-13	-4	18	16	11	7	13	17	16	15	17	0	23	16	28
13	-27	-27	-7	-13	-11	-17	-11	-3	-8	-8	-7	-23	0	-7	15
14	-21	-24	-4	-8	-9	-13	-5	2	-2	-2	1	-16	7	0	17
15	-34	-30	-16	-18	-19	-21	-15	-16	-15	-15	-14	-28	-15	-17	0

As you can see, this is a bit confusing, but if you can understand how to read it, it is MUCH more informative than the Borda count. Basically, the Borda count was off because more of the "option 1" voters bullet voted and buried option 2, which is the more strategic effective thing to do. But overall there were more supporters of option 2. Homunq (talk) 20:01, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Homunq, do you have any evidence that supporters of 1 buried 2 for strategic reasons (i.e., not as an expression of their honest opinion) more commonly than the reverse? Personally, I ranked 2 last because I believe it to be actively unfair, while the other non-1 options are simply unwise. I really do appreciate all the work you've done here, but I'm finding it hard to square this particular comment with WP:AGF. Best, --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 03:06, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. The fact that 1-supporters often voted 2 explicitly solo last, while 2-supporters often voted it after another option such as 3,4,5, or 12, is the "more strategic" thing to do and results in what appears to me to be a distorted Borda count, even if those sentiments are perfectly honest. Insofar as this is my bias showing through, it's my bias against the Borda count, not among the options. Homunq (talk) 11:05, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I appreciate that. --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 11:46, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

(If anyone doubts that my main interest in this debate is the voting system itself: I could show you a web page from 1998, an FAQ in support of IRV and Condorcet which I made using a custom python script, where I talk about the strategic problems with Borda. That's older than wikipedia itself!) Homunq (talk) 13:33, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

You can see the calculations involved at the spreadsheet link above. Of course, we should all remember that this is NOT A PURE VOTE and that the administrators involved have discretion to consider factors other than raw totals. In particular, they should consider user 20040302's suggestion of 1+4+12 (or as I've called it, option 15), which most voters did not explicitly vote on either way, and which therefore makes an artificially poor showing in the numbers above. However, as I and others said before I saw the totals, Borda count is not the way to go here, and I'd consider the Condorcet numbers more meaningful. Homunq (talk) 20:09, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Also, working out those tallies was a lot of work, so I'd appreciate it if someone gave me a barnstar of some kind. (But don't give me a bunch of them, that would just be silly.) Homunq (talk) 20:17, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

You have my hearty thanks. Mixed in, of course, with a little more advocacy for the idea that if options 1 and 2 are statistically equal (or if 1 should rank negligibly higher based on Borda and Jezebel advocacy), we should have 1+2+12, or 1+4+12, or (better) 1+2+4+12+.... See Chaos's essay linked above. JJB 20:45, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

What happens if you don't 'take the liberty of tallying an additional option 15', but treat these as actually votes for option 12? Do we add up 1183 + 706 = 1889 in the Borda results? If so, there is a clear majority there. --Nigelj (talk) 21:24, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

There are only 12 votes which I counted as mentioning 15; for all others, I counted 15 as equal-last. About half of those 12 votes already explicitly mention option 12 as well. If I add option 12 on the remaning ~6 votes, then option 12 goes from 1183 to 1233-1239 Borda count points (depending on whether I add it after 15 or before it.) In the Condorcet matrix, I haven't checked (my spreadsheet crashes when I calculate the whole condorcet result at once, so I have to do it in two parts, which is annoying) but just eyeballing the matrix it's entirely possible (likely) that the result becomes a three-way Condorcet cycle of 12>2>1>12. (Though I expect that's not an honest cycle; I suspect that the 12>2 result is a result of 1-voters strategically burying 2. If even two of those burials were dishonest, from voters who actually equally disliked 2 and 12 but saw 2 as the greater threat, then 2 would still be the honest winner.)

But let me say that one of those votes which I counted for 15 and not for 12 was my own, and I would not be happy with 12 alone. So from my perspective, this isn't so much "counting votes for 15 as votes for 12", but rather vice versa. Homunq (talk) 22:00, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

ps. Total number of voters is 158, including JoshuaZ's late vote (which I'm counting because I suspect it's a time zone issue). Homunq (talk) 22:18, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

pps. A lot of voters divided the options up into categories (two or more out of "strongly support", "support", "neutral", "oppose", and "strongly oppose"). To me, this shows that thinking of voting in such categorical terms is natural to people. If the voting hadn't been preannounced as Borda, and all voters had been encouraged to vote in this way, then we could have counted the results using Majority Judgment. This would have given a median grade to each option (for instance, "support-", or "neutral+"), which I think would have been useful in making a final determination. If I were a closing admin, I'd see a difference between a near-tie between two options which are supported by over half of voters ("support-" or better), and one between two options which are opposed by over half ("oppose+" or worse).

In fact, exhortations like HelviticaBold's, to simply vote a ranked ballot without extra arguments or commentary, were actually counterproductive in this sense. HelviticaBold is correct that it is marginally easier to cut-and-paste a simple ranked list; but it is impossible to infer the difference between levels of support or opposition from such a ballot. On balance, I think that's a bad trade-off.

So, if this kind of thing ever happens again, I would strongly suggest using majority judgment or Condorcet voting, perhaps augmented by some formal way to delegate the votes (a la SODA voting). Other good systems, such as Range voting or Approval voting seem to me less practical in this case, because the inevitable problems of how to interpret votes which didn't explicitly rate every option would be more serious than under the systems I suggested. Homunq (talk) 22:36, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Homunq, what if you do a Condorcet Borda tally of only the four broad categories, as I suggested? --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 02:57, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm not exactly sure what that would mean in practice. What do you do if someone voted something like 5,2,1,4,6? And insofar as people didn't do that, the answers you seek are already in the Condorcet matrix above. Basically, choose the "best" row for each of the categories - that would be 1,2,5, and 12; though 6 is a close second to 5. Homunq (talk) 03:41, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I should have said Borda, not Condorcet. My suggestion was an attempt to mitigate some of the problems with the Borda method (though, in the event, things perhaps went in the opposite direction to what I had feared). --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 11:46, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it's interesting. Voting system says that Borda is vulnerable to teaming; I did not know that, if the "team" is unstrategic, it can work the opposite way and be vulnerable to spoilers. Homunq (talk) 13:27, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

But by the way: IRV could also have shown pathology in this case. Vote-splitting between 12 and 2 could easily have led the Condorcet winner 2 to have been prematurely eliminated. Thus votes for 12>2>1 could have helped 1 beat 2. Homunq (talk) 13:41, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

This is exceptionally silly. If the closing admins take any of this voting system nonsense into account, we'll be back at arbcom in a week. Stop it. Hipocrite (talk) 13:42, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

I understand what you're saying, but I disagree. I feel that a good voting system (not Borda), used wisely (ie, remembering WP:VOTE) can (or at least could have) help(ed) find a stronger consensus. Homunq (talk) 13:47, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

The Arrow voting theorem assures us that there is no 'best' voting system. There seems to be a pretty strong pointer to option 2 from the above results (which, I should mention, was my preference). Picking a voting system after tabulating the results--esp. if it requires second-guessing what voters meant-- is what will hamper consensus. I'm sure a system could be found to make many of the options come out on top. The closing admins aren't bound to take the top vote-getter, unless I misunderstand the closing method to be used here, so using more systems strikes me as just muddying the water. Thanks for your effort in tallying this, but I'd be inclined to let the closing admins take it from here. JJL (talk) 17:22, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Black Kite, at least, is on record as considering the "voting" tally highly advisory. Which seems great to me; I'm really looking to the closing admins to actually think about this in terms of policy and encyclopedic coherence, since the community has done spectacularly poorly at that to my way of thinking. (Every bit of support for option 2, which does not unambiguously identify a topic, is part of that IMO, but whatever.) —chaos5023 (talk) 17:58, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Arrow's Theorem doesn't tell us to give up trying to find a best system; it just puts some constraints on how good that can be (if you want a ranked system; and there are similar constraints for rated or delegated systems). Anyway, I was on record as opposing Borda and preferring Condorcet from before the tally. And the message of Condorcet is: there's no consensus, and 1,2, and 12 all get notable support; so the closers should try to find something more subtle than just "call them X". I think chaos5023's ideas are promising but this section is not for making that argument it's just for presenting the tally. (And even if you think the tally is useless, someone still had to do it, or I guarantee people would have squealed.) Homunq (talk) 18:24, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Homunq, both methods show that 1 and 2 are close enough to be a statistical tie. Since the voting isn't binding anyway there is no need to just let the one with a slightly better showing win. I say this as someone who voted for the winner under the announced system (1). The differences in the systems are trivial to us since they both show the statistical tie. If all we want is a clear decision at this point a coin flip would serve as well as anything.

However, if the point of this exercise was to hash out ideas then let me say I am intrigued by 20040302s suggestion. I don't like putting the prefix 'anti' in either topic because of the negative spin. I do like the idea of creating pages with a clear and manageable focus. I want unbiased titles on stand alone pages but I think it's valid for two opposing pages to have bias in their own favor. It's like an op. ed. (opposing editorial) in a newspaper. But here's the sticky bit: How do we fairly manage two opposing pages in a controversial subject when anyone on either side can edit either page? If resolving that problem is the real point of all this page refactoring I may want to change my vote. I like the idea of op. ed. but not if we can't make it work. Gaelhalee (talk) 16:14, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

British administrators?

• It's mildly interesting that all three closers are British, which may have an impact on how Option 1 is assessed. I think most Brits would recognise "pro-choice" and "pro-life" as largely American language from a largely American debate. Whether this means that those who !voted option 1 because it's the most common term that they encounter will receive any less weight is anyone's guess, of course.—S Marshall T/C 11:40, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

  Shouldn't matter unless they're working from an unquestioned assumption that these articles are inherently scoped as each about one side of abortion issues, ignoring WP:TITLE and evaluating those terms as ways to talk about abortion advocacy globally. Hopefully we can expect better of a batch of ArbCom-hand-picked admins. —chaos5023 (talk) 13:06, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Regarding S Marshall's comment "I think most Brits etc", above: Surely verifiable sources (eg. Oxford and Chambers online dictionaries) always trump opinions? Petecarney (talk) 14:08, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Heh. Okay, if you like, it's my opinion that "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are largely American language from a largely American debate. In my opinion if it wasn't largely about the American right wing, "pro-life" would mean things like "in favour of banning the death penalty". But that's only my opinion.  ;)—S Marshall T/C 22:07, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

I added some additional information here, as it doesn't directly relate to the discussion closure. Petecarney (talk) 09:12, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Questions about closure

What is the best thing to do with additional options (such as 12+4+1/12+4/12+1, or "activism" instead of "movement"/"movements") which came up after voting had started and so didn't get enough consideration/discussion by many voters?

1. Not consider them; too late, too bad.
2. Closing administrators decide on them yes or no, without giving the full community a chance to comment.
3. Use WP:IAR to extend the closing deadline enough for a brief comment period on these extra options.
4. Any of the above, at the discretion of the closing administrators.

Obviously, in practice, the answer is #4, but I'd like to hear comments on the other options. Personally, I'd favor #3 over #2 over #1. Homunq (talk) 13:23, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Certainly we want the best outcome, but given the highly contentious nature of the subject matter which led to this unusual way of handling it I think that anything other than #1 will fail to achieve the sense of consensus and closure that this whole exercise was about. JJL (talk) 15:01, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

As for the question of 12+1 or 12+4 (I do not understand how 12+4+1 is coherent), people have been saying all along that 12 is not incompatible with either 1 or 2 or 4. On the contrary, the only sensible way to go with 12 is for it to focus on the issues while you still have two other pages on the opposing movements, and the latter must follow 1 or 2 or 4. I don't think it would be any problem for the closing admins to decide on this course of action, if that is their conclusion based on the discussion that was just closed.

As for "activism" rather than "movements", that is decidedly a secondary issue, behind the question of whether to go with 1 or 2 or 4. I would suggest we choose 1 or 2 or 4 and use "movements" for now. But if, after that decision is made, there is another !vote resulting in a large consensus for "activism" rather than "movements", I should think that would be non-contentious enough for some relevant authority to IAR enough to let it be enacted. --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 19:41, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

The question is on the title(s) to be used for this content and it is clear that !voters considered options (like 12) where the content did not remain in exactly two articles. To continue my advocacy and gratified that the admins are watching this option closely, I submit that if the final decision is 1+?+12, namely, to spread this content around five or more titles, this has the benefit of allowing the admins to kick part of the question back to the community as to how much content should go in each title. If WP:SUMMARY style is observed cautiously in a proper hierarchy with "abortion debate" at the top but with exceptions such as excluding content about say capital punishment from the top article, this allows the admins to give a recommended outline for each topic that gives the community enough space to return to harmonious editing. I have prepared such outlines for contentious areas successfully before and may return to this page. JJB 19:54, 28 April 2012 (UTC) On second thought, my flurry of creative writing may be way too hot to handle right now. Let it simmer. JJB 02:25, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Comments by Closing Admin

In the closing section, the following comment is made: "This obviously isn't a counting exercise, but there are only three options with any serious amount of support, which are 1,2 and 12 (and its variants). Proponents of 1 are often virulently opposed to 2 and vice-versa. These numbers are about equal."

I'm not sure what "These numbers are about equal" means. The number of votes separating the #1 choice (option 1) and the #2 (option 2) is greater than the amount of votes separating the #2 choice and the #6 choice. That's not close. That's a blow out.LedRush (talk) 13:26, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

• I thought it was quite clear. The number of "1" voters who clearly oppose "2", and the number of "2" supporters who clearly oppose "1" is roughly equal. A number of voters are ok with "1" OR "2" or at least do not strongly oppose the "opposite"choice. Black Kite (talk) 16:00, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

  Unfortunately option 2 is useless from an encyclopedic and policy standpoint. It only even makes sense as an option if you assume that these articles' scope magically arrives out of nowhere and merely calls for some kind of label, instead of their scope being defined by their titles per WP:TITLE. —chaos5023 (talk) 16:44, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

LedRush's comment appears to be referring to Borda count points rather than votes. In this case it is unclear what the concrete meaning of the Borda count points is/should be, so I strongly endorse Black Kite's response as more pertinent. Specifically, the gap between first place (option 2) and second place (option 1) is two voters, while the gap between first and third place (option 12) is four voters. Homunq (talk) 16:53, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Where are these numbers of voters? Are they tabulated anywhere? I guess when you say, "the gap between first and third place (option 12) is four voters" you're looking at people's first choice !votes? I may be being thick, but I can't make head nor tail of the 'Condorcet matrix' above - are these figures hidden in there somewhere? --Nigelj (talk) 18:16, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes. Look at the row which starts with "2" and the column "1": the number 2 says that there are 2 more voters which have 2>1 than those which have 1>2. Similarly, row 2 column 12 has the number 4. Homunq (talk) 19:03, 30 April 2012 (UTC) ps. see Condorcet_method#Pairwise_counting_and_matrices, except that the matrix above has ((votes for) - (votes against)) in each cell, instead of just (votes for). Homunq (talk) 19:09, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

The quote seems to me to directly relate back to the concept that people in favor of 1 are virulently opposed to 2, and vice versa. However, the Borda count demonstrates that this is not true. If 2 more people prefer 2 to 1, but the difference between option 1 and 2 in borda count is greater than the difference between option 2 and the next 4 options together, it is quite clear that people who support 1 virulently oppose 2, but that the people who support 1 don't hate 2 2 don't hate 1 nearly as much. To me, that is quite instructive as to what is more likely to be an acceptable outcome for all.LedRush (talk) 19:58, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

(I think you mixed up 1 and 2 in the last clause there) You are correct that the Borda result shows an assymmetry, and that part of that is the strong opposition to 2 by supporters of 1. But another part of it is that many who strongly oppose 1, do support 2, but not as their favorite choice; many chose 3 or 4 (and/or in some cases 5,6, or 12) over 2. Since the Borda count, unlike Range voting or Majority Judgment, only counts preference order and not preference strength, it is not really fair to assume that this means that 1 would be "more acceptable" to the electorate in any meaningful way. Homunq (talk) 22:59, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

(your point about my mix up in the last clause above is correct) Your point about people who prefer 2 to 1 not necessarily having 2 as their first choice is quite revealing. Counting up first-place votes and Borda votes strongly indicates that choice 1 is the favorite choice by a wide margin. And I disagree that the count does not show preference strength. It does, and quite clearly. Sure, it's not perfect, but ranking items 1-14 is inherently a listing of the strength of your opinion on the matters.LedRush (talk) 23:15, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Tabulating votes

Just noting here that I've come up with my own Heath Robinson-style results table (transcluded into Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Abortion_article_titles#Admin discussion on the project page). I mean no disrespect to those who've worked on the matrix above, but I wanted something that preserved the nature of the preferences expressed and there was some disagreement about formal methods of vote tallying and weighting. Best, EyeSerene^talk 19:25, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Now that I understand. Thank you, EyeSerene. What I see now is that 46 people support or strongly support ('SoSS') option 1; 16 SoSS option 2; and 28 SoSS option 12 or some combination involving it (1+4+12, 1+12). I don't suppose anyone is interested in my opinion - I'm just one of the previously uninvolved !voters here - but I see the level of support for option 1 as the problem, and that for option 12 as the most viable solution. --Nigelj (talk) 21:16, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

I like the fact that you include support levels in your table... but I don't fully understand it. Is there an overlap between the two halves of the table? That is, are there some voters who show up as both "strong support" and "first choice", as well as others who show up as only one or the other? Homunq (talk) 21:25, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

No vote has been double-counted. It's complicated because some respondents recorded their vote along the lines of "Support 1 & 12, then 3, 5, 2, 9; strongly oppose 14". In that case I recorded 1 & 12 in the "Support" column, ranked 3, 5, 2 & 9 in the "Ranking" section (counting the supports for 1 & 12 as though they were in 1st and 2nd place, so starting from 3rd), and recorded 14 in the "Strong oppose" column. Really the two halves of the table have to be read together. It would almost be possible to move everything in the "Support" column into "1st" in the "Rankings" section, but I tried as far as possible to keep the format a reflection of the way the votes were offered. I also wasn't sure how to appropriately weight strong support/oppose votes in the ranking system. As I said, it's a bit of a kludge but hopefully representative of the discussion. I'll post up another table showing how I parsed the votes as soon as I can sort out the spreadsheet>wikimarkup conversion. EyeSerene^talk 07:27, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Changed my mind and tried to work out a scoring scheme (see main page). It's perhaps not entirely worthless but it probably shouldn't be treated with too much respect either... EyeSerene^talk 11:34, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

I believe the scoring system you've made is a good try, but fundamentally unfair; it gives more power to support/oppose than to rankings. Point-systems are always going to have various problems (that's why I prefer Condorcet here) but if you are going to do it, you should at least be as fair as possible. Strong support or support should both get 14 points, neutral should get 7, oppose should get 1, and strongly oppose should get 0. (I'd say 13 for support, but there were some people who showed support without strong support, and that would be unfair to them.) Homunq (talk) 15:46, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree, though I wanted something where an oppose effectively cancelled out a support :) Tbh I was really just playing on the spreadsheet and thought I'd post up the results, but I might remove that table if it's causing misconceptions about the level of attention I think we should be giving to scoring. If you want the data table I used I'll be happy to supply it; you can then weight it more appropriately if you like. As I said earlier though, it's not much more than an exercise in playing with statistics and won't loom large in any final decision. EyeSerene^talk 16:07, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Fair enough. I've played with my own spreadsheet enough to know that these numbers are close enough that you can make them come out however you want them. So, judge on the arguments, not on the votes, and I'll be happy. Homunq (talk) 18:18, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm bothered by these comments that somehow these results are close. Any way you look at all the numbers and analysis, it's clear that the voting produced a total blowout. First place votes? Option 1 doubles option 12 and triples option 2. Borda? Option 1 crushes option 2 by a margin wide enough to encompass the difference between option 2 and the next 4 closest options. Strength of opinion? Option 1 garners far more top level votes and fewer bottom ones than option 2. Only in Condorcet do the numbers get close, and that is a statistical tie. So, when every way of looking at the numbers shows a blow-out, but one way shows a tie, what's the obvious outcome?LedRush (talk) 18:42, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Because, as I said before I knew which results would point which way, all those metrics you're talking about are deeply flawed, and Condorcet is in my opinion the only fair way to use the ballots we have in an asymmetric situation like this (that is, one unified side against a diffuse group which is dispersed through vote-splitting). In fact, since strategically Borda tends to favor teaming, I actually suspected Borda would favor option 2 (and 3 and 4), which I personally favor over 1, and I still warned that it was a bad system. And you're wrong to say "there's many results which point to 1 and only one which points to 2"; in fact, the "numerous" metrics you're citing are all point-systems, and thus essentially the same at heart. By the same token, I could say that all of the many distinct Condorcet methods point to 2; but you'd be right to point out that, since they all use the same data in essentially the same way, of course they agree. Homunq (talk) 19:24, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

The idea that the people who supported option 2 were not a unified side is contradicted by all evidence of the history of the articles. This unified group of editors tried unsuccessfully to change article titles on multiple occassions, pushed through changes a mere month after their last proposal was defeated, and then used that one victory to push for a change in the other article's title (after previous defeats there). What has happened here is that many new faces have entered into the discussion, and many people that were merely tired of having to fight the same fight over and over again returned for one last discussion. That results in letting us know that option 1 has far more support than option 2, and that new editors voting here either prefer option 2 to 1 but that opinion is not strongly expressed, or prefer option 1 to 2 and that opinion is strongly expressed.LedRush (talk) 20:22, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Lets not assume that a vote for 12 was a vote against 1, especially since 12 voters had the chance to explicitly voice an opinion against 1 and most chose not to. The only two options that are close are 2 and 12 for 2nd place, 1 garnered as many votes are 2 and 12 put together while receiving about half the number of no votes. Juno (talk) 21:31, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm not assuming anything. There are two more voters who clearly stated a preference for 2 over 1 (including votes like "support 2 over all the rest") than support 1 over 2 (ditto). That is a fact. Since several of these votes were expressed as rankings, not ratings, it is impossible to reliably infer preference strength from these votes, and therefore impossible to be sure that the 1>2 preference is stronger overall than the 2>1 preference. That is another fact; a fundamental weakness of strictly ranked systems like Borda, and a reason not to use this system in the future. As to whether some people were too "tired of having to fight the same fight over and over again" to vote or whatever, I have no opinion on that. Homunq (talk) 22:02, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing out that I am actually capable of reading the various tabulations. Black Kite (talk) 00:19, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Alleged US-centricism of pro-x titles

I made a comment in the section "British administrators?" above which I though was somewhat off-topic to the discussion closure. Having belatedly read EyeSerene's comments on the project page I realise that it is actually very relevant. In EyeSerene's comment 1 (Site policy, etc.) he says "The point is repeatedly made that ... option 1 is not compatible with a world-wide viewpoint". It it true? What is the evidence? It seems undisputed that the two pro-x phrases were coined in the US but it is worth asking the question whether they have now become international or remain regional. There is good evidence that they are familiar in Britain but I have no knowledge of other global flavours of English. Surely it would be a simple exercise, and helpful to the debate, to find reliable sources to answer this key question of fact? Petecarney (talk) 16:30, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

They remain regional, and people repeatedly raising that as if it were some kind of problem mostly displays how broken the popular way of approaching the RFC is. If we use those titles, it scopes the articles as about the US movements concerned, and that is a good thing because 1) that's what the articles were originally about and WP:PRESERVE would have us not go around gratuitously trashing article history and whatnot, and 2) it is completely stupid to have two separate opposing issue-oriented articles as people seem to think is some kind of mandate from heaven. —chaos5023 (talk) 16:52, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Three mile island and watergate are familiar in Britain, but that doesn't make them international or British. --Nigelj (talk) 16:59, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Chaos5023, several editors have asserted that these terms are regional. The point is can you provide any evidence? We don't accept bare assertions in articles, we insist on verfiable sources. That's what I'm asking for here. Petecarney (talk) 17:31, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

No, I am way over my dealing-with-bullshit threshold on this RFC and seriously cannot be bothered. —chaos5023 (talk) 17:33, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

I'd also suggest that, as the one editor so far making the exceptional claim that they are not regional, that the burden would be on you to produce verifiable sources saying so. —chaos5023 (talk) 17:35, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

It's not an exceptional claim. Just search any English language news source outside the US (examples: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]) Formerip (talk) 20:10, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Okay. So we do in fact have people referring to pro-life and pro-choice movements outside the US. Do you figure that there's enough of that that the US movements aren't WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for the terms? Because if so, option 1 is ambiguous and what we would actually need is United States pro-choice movement and United States pro-life movement. Which would be kinda unfortunate to not have been considered in the RFC. —chaos5023 (talk) 20:58, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

*Pro-choice movement in the United States, surely. Quick, everyone, let's restart the RFC!  :-)—S Marshall T/C 00:53, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Eww, S Marshall. That's two entire unnecessary words. Gross. —chaos5023 (talk) 04:54, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Going back to EyeSerene's comments on the project page I'd note that so far no sources have been identified to support his statement that "option 1 is not compatible with a world-wide viewpoint", while plenty of reliable sources do contradict it. If subsidiary articles are required then titles such as "Pro-x movement in the United States", "Pro-x movement in the United Kingdom", and "Pro-x movement in Australia" etc. would be perfectly reasonable. Petecarney (talk) 10:51, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

• I don't think it's a serious concern, actually, Petecarney. On reading of the closers' deliberations my view is that we're more likely to get a compromise than a decision, so the abortion article titles won't be "pro-choice" or "pro-life" anyway.—S Marshall T/C 11:15, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
• Well, EyeSerene is only noting the "worldwide viewpoint" issue as relevant to the case where we're interpreting these articles as inherently scoped to worldwide one-sided issue coverage, which of course tons of !voters did but is actually completely nonsensical. —chaos5023 (talk) 14:55, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Really all I intended in my summary was to acknowledge that a 'global view' argument had been put forward by voters depending on what scope they thought the articles should have and/or what they thought the RfC was about. I make no comment on the weight of the argument other than that it's one additional point for consideration among many. EyeSerene^talk 07:49, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

HJ Mitchell conclusions

Affirm there is no consensus and stronger consensus should be demonstrated. While putting in another advertisement for Chaos5023's analysis, I believe consensus would best be demonstrated by having more than three articles rather than limiting options to one or another of the pairs or the monad. I have tested this theory indirectly by rebuilding the dabs pro-death and anti-life, which after initial challenge are now quite stable; a strong consensus (such as this debate needs) was demonstrated on this minor question at DRV. (The dabs are not part of the debate because they have other meanings than abortion, but they illustrate the point that a clear topic scoping upfront removes the need for contention.)

In short, if there is one article that gives all the meanings of pro-life, including those unrelated to the abortion debate, then one subsection of it can be a summary of a second article on right-to-life or anti-abortion or both; other terms are handled similarly. Those who object that "pro-life" shouldn't point to anti-abortion get their way; those who object that "pro-life" should have an article that includes anti-abortion details get their way; and clear scoping is laid out to prevent move wars or fork wars. In particular, if any solution of three or fewer articles exists, by definition there will exist some term that will redirect to some other term that some significant group of Wikipedians believes is inaccurate or misleading. This is so obvious mathematically that I would hope it would inform consensus-building in a second RFC.

In my experience if you can get people to agree on clear scoping the rest is easy. Thank you again for the opportunity to present this proposal. JJB 17:05, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you JJB, though I'd have appreciated seeing that support expressed closer to 10:57 pm, 23 February 2012 (UTC) when I raised the issue of the false dichotomy. The community ignored it in droves, so I must infer an unfortunate preference for black-and-white thinking predominates. LeadSongDog come howl! 19:16, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Comment on the initital HJM response

I reserve comment on the rest of HJ Mitchell's response except to note that I agree strongly that whoever proposed voting should be fired, and then to comment on his request that "the same three admins ... should be the ones to close this second phase of the RfC."

In a word? "No."

These three admins were derelict in their duty to close this RFC. Why anyone would give them another bite at the apple after they took more than a month to close this is beyond me. No, sorry, you three are fired. If you want not to be fired, set deadlines, and set consequences for breaching them - I suggest desysoping - for abject failures like this month long wait. No excuses - I don't care. Hipocrite (talk) 12:41, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

The delay is entirely my fault, and EyeSerene and Black Kite shouldn't be considered responsible. I've been inactive on WP and busy in real life of late, which explains but does not excuse the length of time it took me to write my conclusions. Assuming there is a second discussion, you are quite welcome to suggest to ArbCom that they dismiss me (if AGK or a majority of arbs agree with you, I will step down). You're equally at liberty to suggest they replace all three of us, though finding three other impartial admins in good standing might be difficult, so I would recommend you suggest possible replacements. Please accept my apologies for the delay. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 19:05, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

A second (or extended) RFC would certainly be demoralizing. On the other hand, getting it as close to right as possible is important--this has to be settled. It takes too much energy away from actual article improvement. I hope a second RFC can be avoided. The process to stop the interminable edit-warring should not itself be interminable. A decision and finality on the matter is needed. Incidentally, the comment about "discouraging voting" is meaningless. Every comment will be a vote. If you want no voting, you need to do it courtroom style (I am not advocating this)--select an advocate for each view and limit the discussion to those individuals. To think that this RFC could be handled in a way that would keep editors from voting with their comments, by whatever verbal subterfuge is needed, is not so much wonderfully idealistic as it is shockingly wiki-naive. JJL (talk) 03:58, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

This issue will never be resolvable by counting tallies because the community appears, by and large, incapable of desisting from believing this is a referendum on terminology long enough to think about the implications of any of these choices in an encyclopedic context. Everybody likes to go by numbers in tough situations like this because it gives people a nice democratic feeling, but it is not going to work here because the tallies are of people answering six different wrong questions. Hell, to all visible evidence, most of the people registering opinions never read the prepared arguments (and fascinatingly, the closing admins have had almost nothing to say about them either). The consensus you need to be reading to resolve this is the consensus that starts with "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia" and goes from there. You need to actually interpret WP:TITLE and WP:COMMONNAME and WP:PRIMARYTOPIC and WP:PRESERVE and apply the established global consensus as to how this project works. In short, you need to be administrators, not tabulators. And if you're going to disregard my essay on how this process is going wrong, you ought to have a hell of a lot better reason for doing so than that it's inconvenient to think about. —chaos5023 (talk) 07:41, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Actually, I read the prepared arguments and your essay with great interest. In fact, I think many of your contributions to this RfC have been extremely valuable, but there is only such much administrators can do. Our job is to sum up the arguments and determine what the consensus is (if there is one at all). We could state that the consensus arrived at here wasn't compatible with site policy (if that were the case), but we don't have the power to impose a solution that doesn't have consensus (and people would, not unduly, be calling for our heads if we attempted to). HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 19:05, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Indeed; or we could have closed it one day flat by saying "No consensus, sorry". I think the discussion about option 12 certainly does take the idea of scope into question, so it certainly isn't inconvenient to think about. Ignoring Hipocrite's silly rant, if there is a second RfC I do not mind whether we use the same 3 admins or not; there is always the chance that whoever agrees to take the task on may be delayed by real world issues, as HJ and to an extent myself both were. Black Kite (talk) 19:15, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

In regards to your essay, it is difficult for administrators to base any decision on it because editors sadly did not respond to it. I would actually welcome a second RFC in the hopes that the same issue could be brought up. Ryan Vesey Review me! 19:26, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Okay. Maybe the best thing that could happen here would be a new RFC that attempts to ask the right question. My minimal standard for the question being right would be that resolutions to the effect of this RFC's option 12, and hybrid resolutions like "1+4+12", are clearly valid answers to it. Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Abortion-related topic coverage, perhaps. We can probably get a more thoughtful reaction out of the community if our initial structure doesn't look like a referendum on terminology. —chaos5023 (talk) 00:51, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Affirm Chaos, in hopes of a fair hearing for 1+4+12 and ilk. JJB 01:24, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Black Kite conclusions

Black Kite first seemed to allow the likes of 1+4+12 as a contender, then seems to disallow it. The best response to nonconsensus is not instant runoff. (The best response is to figure out concerns and address them.) The idea that this is about finding the best titles for 2 (of 3) extant articles is demonstrably false, as one or more of the options were for the 2 articles not to continue existing as 2 articles. This should not be a runoff between the highest-grossing candidates (or pairs) to pick one winner and runningmate. This is about organizing extant content into a widely agreeable framework: the current framework is the problem!

The community's concerns are best addressed by a multipolar rather than (um) bipolar solution. If your concern is that a term is too loaded, have an article on that term that expresses the degree of loadedness. If your concern is that a term has the wrong scope, have an article on that term where the scope is defined by the RS. If your concern is that one term should not redirect to another because they aren't synonyms (none of them are), have interlinks to show the compare and contrast between terms.

In the bipolar "solution", every term in the same group gets lumped together. The editors who are favorable to one group object that the nuances are lost, the editors who are opposed to that group similarly (!!!) object that mention of one term imbalances the propriety of another. I don't know that I will take time to review the comments and demonstrate that the nonconsensus arises from the straitjacket of (1) a candidate-pair list and (2) voting, and that consensus would favor a proposal like mine. But the fact is that limiting ourselves to 2 articles (among 4 million) has now been shown to be a loser from the start.

Maybe the best path forward is for me to get my hands dirty and reorganize the current text (along with new text) of the 2 articles towards what I identified as the highest-level terms (pro-choice and right-to-life), with subsections on what I call the lower-level terms, insofar as consensus permits. If it starts to look like I anticipate, we might actually get ripe for splitting before a second RFC can conclude. But that's optimistic both about my time and my reception. At any rate, the takeaway is that bipolar voting doesn't work, and my next attempts will be to demonstrate alternatives. JJB 21:18, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

• Apologies if my second comment appeared to disallow 12+4+1 etc - I have refactored them to add this option. As I suggested originally, I think it is one of the better options given the amount of polarity between options 1 and 2. Black Kite (talk) 09:35, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree that multiple articles (such as 12+4+1) is probably the best way to go here. It does, however, present a problem; while the focus of any such "sub" article is of course the scope given by its title (in general, historical information about a movement), all such articles will have to include a summary-style section on the overall debate. The more such sections there are, the more inevitable (intentional or unintentional) POV-forking will happen.

Therefore, if we do go this route, I suggest that we use a single common template (with v/t/e links) for all the summary-style sections on "abortion debate". I know this solution has its own downsides (linguistic awkwardness of not customizing the section to each article, interface awkwardness of two "edit" buttons with only the inner one working, issues with re-wikilinking terms that may occur in the lede) but I absolutely think they're worth it. These problems are much less serious than POV-forking; and no matter how vigilant and conscientious we are, if there are 4 or more individual "one side" articles, POV-forking is completely unavoidable. Homunq (talk) 12:06, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks both. I'm not certain that every article requires much summary on the debate, as they are spinouts of the debate and so the debate article is expected to summarize them. There would only be enough mention of the overall debate to ground the reader (such as in the lead); the ordinary weighting issues in each section (i.e., pro and con statements each duly weighted) would still arise but would be expected to be resolved locally according to scope. Nobody overloads one side's article with the other side's POV; that's not a naming issue, that's ordinary disruption. Article forking is valid, but POV forking would not arise because that only happens when two titles are obviously the same subject but one is unwatched, and in this case we have consensus that no two titles are really the same subject, and plenty of watching.

A common boxed template containing debate description would be contraindicated because its contents would be encyclopedic rather than navigational and would be expected to be inline. An inline template containing debate description is possible but these have been rarely successful allegedly because of editability confusion. I like them myself and one such as you describe is possible (feel free, I'll support), but the questions of maintenance, complexity, contingency, and necessity will make it an uphill climb for consensus. JJB 12:40, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

What we need is an RFC that asks the question of what abortion-related topics are we going to cover and under what titles, with a specification that Support for the legalization of abortion and Opposition to the legalization of abortion are considered particularly eligible for new titles, if appropriate, and other articles should probably not be moved unless a particularly compelling reason for doing so is found. Apply the original three-year binding to whatever titles those two articles have afterward, if they still exist, and specify that no prejudice is indicated against the creation of new articles on notable abortion-related topics unless the RFC specifically generates such prejudice (such as by concluding, idiotically, that we will not cover the United States pro-life, pro-choice, and right-to-life movements as distinct topics). Said RFC should not be limited to debate among "winning" results from this RFC because debate on this RFC centered around a fundamentally flawed question and people should be given the opportunity to think outside its boxes. —chaos5023 (talk) 14:27, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Affirm again. JJB 14:58, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

What happens next?

Whose turn is it to respond? (That's the problem with a triumvirate, it's enough for bystander effect to kick in.) Homunq (talk) 17:42, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

I am feeling as if I should mock up the RFC I have in my head for people's consideration moving forward. I have not so far overcome the mental exhaustion the concept induces far enough to actually do so. —chaos5023 (talk) 21:31, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

I too have A Path Forward that can be sparked by my own contributions and realistic hopes of harmonious editing, but that tempts one to the mental exhaustion that finds other work to do first IRL. I like the admins' latest RFC suggestions asking about scope, and the expansion of the net to other articles is indicated. But the degree to which I can contribute is limited by those other factors that Chaos has alluded to. JJB 17:32, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Possibilities

If we are to move forward, could people chip in here on EyeSerene's latest comment? Are those three options enough? Are there others that should be considered? What are they? etc. Thanks, Black Kite (talk) 08:40, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

I said this in my !vote, but it seems to me that the obvious solution would be to have the "Pro-life movement" and "Pro-choice movement" articles focus only on the history of the U.S. movements, with a very brief summary of the issues in debate and a {{seealso}} hat to "Abortion debate in the United States". Conversely, "Abortion debate in the United States" should focus only on the debate, with very brief summaries of the movements and {{seealso}} hats directing to "Pro-life movement" and "Pro-choice movement". --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 00:30, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Precisely. And well put. --Nigelj (talk) 13:36, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Followup RFC draft started

Bullet bitten; I have started drafting my idea of what a followup RFC should look like at User:Chaos5023/Abortion coverage. —chaos5023 (talk) 22:10, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your ongoing work on this. I wonder though if it might be feasible to ask those two questions separately rather than in the same RfC? As I mentioned on the main page, I think until the issue of the topic structure is decided, discussing individual article names might be premature. It could be, for example, that editors decide we should have a single article on the US abortion debate rather than separate articles for each viewpoint. Obviously in that case discussing the separate article names would be moot.

I also wonder if, rather than pre-defining a set of options, it might be worthwhile leaving it to respondents to suggest them (or to predefine some possibilities in fairly vague terms and invite other suggestions)? Admittedly the last RfC has thrown up some options that could form the basis of the next, but given some of the comments hereabouts and bearing in mind the eventual need to judge consensus as fairly and accurately as possible, I'd like to be sure that everyone understood exactly what they were discussing! In my experience the best results on WP often come from asking brief, tightly focused and unambiguous questions with open answers that invite explanation (eg "How should Wikipedia organise its coverage of the abortion debate?"). On the other hand, maybe I'm just being too cautious... :) Finally on a personal note, I'm not really sure about the propriety, as a closer, of my commenting on the framing of a new RfC. If there are any objections—perhaps some might feel it calls my status as a disinterested outsider into question—I'll happily step back. EyeSerene^talk 10:15, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

You're welcome, and I'm glad it seems helpful. :)

1. I don't think they really are separate questions; the problems of this RFC largely arise from trying to answer the "title" question without answering the "topic" question. Separating them somewhat mainly serves as an attempt to get people thinking like this is the encyclopedia maintenance issue it is, not the political referendum they've been treating it as. The titles are moot if we decide against covering a topic, certainly, but I don't see that as any kind of problem, and keeping them together lets people, for instance, support the title they would prefer if a topic they don't want to see covered is covered anyway, which I see as beneficial.
2. Regarding pre-defining options, while I'm building out all the structure I can think of, the idea is that for the first month we would all be collaboratively working on that structure, and presumably lots of option work would be part of that. So if that's what you meant, that's addressed. If you're talking about inviting random invention of options in the community feedback phase, that seems like it pretty much guarantees another finding of no consensus, which doesn't seem like a positive outcome. We've had lots of random freeform everybody-suggests-everything, nothing-can-get-any-traction discussion; this RFC's call for structured exploration was an attempt to get away from that, and IMO that part went pretty well, it's just that the structure was developed to explore the wrong question.
3. Closers commenting on structure seems great to me; it helps us give you an RFC you can close effectively. Black Kite's already given plenty of feedback that way (like "let's not have weird voting schemes") and it's very helpful.

—chaos5023 (talk) 16:41, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

I think the division of the sub-article space goes the wrong way in Chaos5023's proposed structure. After a top-level article, Abortion debate, we go straight into a series of for-and-against, matched and opposing pairs again: United States pro-choice movement vs United States pro-life movement etc. Per WP:NPOV, "Neutrality requires that each article or other page in the mainspace fairly represents all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint." This fundamental policy warns against POV forks ("POV forks are not permitted in Wikipedia"), but introduces spinoff content organisation. WP:SPINOFF says, "Summary style articles, with sub-articles giving greater detail, are not POV forking, provided that all the sub-articles, and the summary, conform to Neutral Point of View." In the preceding RFC, option 12 was a proposal to slice up the broad topic into sub-articles by continent, country and/or region, within which laws, legal milestones, and social mores are more consistent. This makes it much more likely that each sub-article can be made compliant with NPOV, without unnecessary duplication of material. The proposal was that after a top-level article, Abortion debate, we would have articles like Abortion debate in the United States, Abortion debate in Europe etc. I know there may be people here who just want to make and polish an article on their chosen POV, but in the spirit of encyclopedia building, I think it would be much better if they put their stuff into NPOV articles next to stuff that properly explains 'the other side' too. --Nigelj (talk) 17:37, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

You're going wrong from the starting gun here by applying WP:NPOV to the question of what topics we cover rather than the question of how we cover topics. WP:NPOV is not written to address that question and should not be made to; that question is a matter of WP:NOTABILITY. I really do not think anybody will be coming up with any non-ridiculous arguments that the United States pro-choice and pro-life movements fail WP:N, to be frank. —chaos5023 (talk) 18:00, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

I think you need to review WP:AGF if I may say so. A key phrase above was "without unnecessary duplication of material". One of three main paragraphs in the ledes of both Support for the legalization of abortion and Opposition to the legalization of abortion (the current redirects for pro-choice and pro-life) deal with the other topic. This is necessarily so, and one would hope that the the trend is continued throughout both articles - for every point made in favour of one topic, balancing information has to be given about the POV of the 'other side'. No one is saying that one topic or the other is non-notable, that is a red herring, and I don't think anything I have said was either wrong or ridiculous. That said, I don't need this, and so will leave you to carry on here as you see fit for a while again. --Nigelj (talk)

Upon reviewing WP:AGF, I don't find anything that makes it clear why you recommended I do so. I didn't question your good faith at any time. But AGF doesn't mean I'm going to assume you're right when you're wrong, and using NPOV as a guide to deciding what topics get articles is blatantly wrong. As to ridiculousness, you're reaching a conclusion that the US pro-choice and pro-life movements are topics we should not cover in their own right, which is ridiculous, so, y'know, there it is. Have fun with your ball and bat. —chaos5023 (talk) 21:32, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Your draft RFC obviously took a great deal of work. Unfortunately, it seems to be headed once more down the path of polar opposites, which in undoubtedly the root of the naming problem. Any such movement has an organizing principle that can be distinguished. Some are politically rooted, some religiously, some geographically. Movements have different techniques of advocacy and promotion. They have gradations among their objectives. While the US movement which calls itself "pro-life" is broadly consistent in its opposition to legal abortion, it is not so consistent in its opposition to contraception. Similarly, while the US movement which calls itself "pro-choice" broadly favours laws that ensure access to legal abortion, it is not so consistent on whether individual physicians should have the choice to decline providing them, or on what counselling should be required. Some think only high-risk pregnancies should be abortable. Some think prospective fathers should have a veto. Some think pregnant minors should always (or shouldn't ever) have a voice in the decision (or should be able to conceal an abortion from their parents). People don't fall neatly into two camps, they have complex, multifactoral viewpoints. As long as we pretend otherwise, we'll continue to stalemate. LeadSongDog come howl! 22:00, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Frankly, why would we care about any of that? It's like holding an extensive debate over whether McDonald's is really owned by someone named McDonald or whether Best Buy can truly be meaningfully said to be the best buy, and if not moving its article to Major American consumer electronics retailer with Best Buy as a redirect. Our job is not to determine whether these labels are valid. This is not a culture war referendum, it is an encyclopedia maintenance issue. —chaos5023 (talk) 18:50, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I've now completely overhauled my RFC draft based on "Reframing" below (and the structure of the "verifiability not truth" RFC). —chaos5023 (talk) 21:52, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

It's also now at User:Chaos5023/Abortion advocacy movement coverage. —chaos5023 (talk) 03:16, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Current titles clearly lost

Can we at least try out option 2 in the meantime? The current titles are misleading as to the content and we've got a clear case of "the perfect is the enemy of the good" going on here. Yes, everyone loves the good 'ol option 1 but that's why we were here in the first place. Debating a refactor is fine but paralysis in the meantime doesn't make sense to me from a customer service standpoint. Scott Illini (talk) 08:52, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

It is worth noting that anti-abortion violence is already an article, abortion debate already uses the term anti-abortion, and the fans of option 1 who want life in the title aren't happy with the current title anyway. Let's at least deliver an interim improvement for this poor thing while the process continues. Scott Illini (talk) 09:15, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Compared to the mainstream political movement, anti-abortion violence is more narrowly focused on opposition to abortion and is not in fact pro-life by most people's definition. Also, the abortion debate article uses the term "anti-abortion" only once to refer to the political movement; not a strong precedent, I think.

I agree with you, though, that the current inaction is frustrating. Is anything happening? Does anyone know whose responsibility it is to take the next step? --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 10:39, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

I think some of the obstructiveness and unpleasantness here has just driven away most of those with a life to lead and interesting articles to go and work on. It's a shame, but it's the way voluntary projects often work out. --Nigelj (talk) 13:33, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, some want the article renamed pro-life and claim that is broader than "opposition to abortion". But again, what do we have to lose by moving opposition to legalized abortion to "anti-abortion"? It is obvious that the movement and issue is broader than just the legal status, so the current title is bogus. There is no excuse for keeping a bogus title for months just because the perfect ultimate resolution cannot be reached. Scott Illini (talk) 17:50, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

I, along with a number of others, ranked the "Opposition" titles ahead of "anti-abortion". It would be up to the closers to determine whether there is a clear consensus for what you propose. --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 20:57, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Scott. It's time to start being bold here, because this stalemate is helping nobody. Until the articles have clear names, they have no clear scope, and they are doomed to stay sick. I think that a SINGLE one of the three (non-)closing administrators should implement some interim solution while a new RfC is crafted. I'd honestly prefer the worst "solution" over this unproductive silence. Homunq (talk) 21:18, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Earth to admins. Shit or get off the pot. Obviously, a 3-way consensus is not going to happen in a reasonable timeframe, so one of you should be bold: either do something to the article titles, or pass the buck to someone besides you three. (I'm not suggesting that anything you do unilaterally will be a permanent solution, just that it will start the ball rolling again.) Homunq (talk) 19:57, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

I think the problem is that although there's clearly consensus for change, that's the only consensus reached so far. One person's interim improvement will be another's disaster. It might be feasible to roll the article titles (if not the content) back to some previous version, but I'm reluctant to do so just to stir the pot. However, with all due regard for the hard work chaos 5023 has already put in at User:Chaos5023/Abortion coverage (which I see may have stalled), I would be open to the closers getting things moving again by writing the next RfC. That approach may have a number of advantages: we'd be coming at it from outside the trenches (as it were); and by now we've got a pretty good idea of what questions we need answers to in order to reach a final decision. Obviously though BK and HJ may have different views. EyeSerene^talk 10:15, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Again, I for one would rather a "disaster" that prompts resolution, than the current stagnation. Please, this pot needs stirring. Homunq (talk) 03:12, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

It would certainly be nice to see if not resolution then progress being made toward one. Ask you-know-who to just issue a decision if need be. This isn't working. JJL (talk) 04:47, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

I would be happy to do that if there are no major objections. Black Kite (talk) 21:00, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Still waiting.

Nothing is happening. Homunq (talk) 20:12, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Getting off the pot

As Homunq stated so eloquently in [14], it's time for admins to do something. My mop hasn't gotten much use lately, but since it appears nobody else is willing to act, I will. I just re-read Wikipedia:Administrators; it doesn't give me much guidance on what authority I have here, but I'll go out on a limb.

I hereby declare this RFC closed, with an outcome of no consensus. I realize that's not as useful as a decision, but at least now people who want to work the issue further can make progress via other channels.

Full disclosure: I participated in the discussion. Normally, that would disqualify me from acting, but it's clear that after three months of inactivity, the process is broken and somebody had to do something. -- RoySmith (talk) 23:19, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. Homunq (talk) 13:25, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Let's just accept the vote results and move on for pity's sake

Of course there was no consensus. Does this actually surprise anyone? Rehashing it into a new RFC isn't going to change that. Clearly the community is strongly divided on this issue. The only way to reach "consensus" in a situation like this is to vote and for all sides to agree to abide by the results of the vote, which is what I thought we were doing. The results of the vote (according to the Borda method, which is the method that was agreed on) are as follows:

Winner: Pro-choice movement / Pro-life movement: 1380 points

Runner-up: Abortion-rights movement / Anti-abortion movement: 1225.5 points

Third place: Refactor to Abortion debate and Abortion debate in RegionName: 1183 points

Even though these results are the opposite of my personal preferences, I would be happy to accept Pro-choice movement / Pro-life movement since anything would be better than another year of this madness. For those of you who say that Borda is a bad voting method, I say the time to object to that was before the vote, not after. Judging the results by a method other than Borda is completely invalid, as I and many other voters would have voted differently if the method were Condorcet or some other ranking method (specifically, we would not have given scores to all the options). So please, for everyone's sanity, just tally the votes and declare a winner. I know the Wikipedia Way is that votes are evil and decisions are made by consensus, but at some point we're going to have to recognize that consensus on this issue is simply not achievable. Let's not waste another year of everyone's time on this. Besides, the results are only binding for 3 years. We can do this all over again in 2015! Kaldari (talk) 03:51, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I totally agree. I think the "winner" shown above is a silly acceptance of the external POV warriors that is not required in a worldwide encyclopedia, but I strongly support the result because, as you suggest, having the community tear itself apart over what to call a couple of articles is crazy. Some editors won, some editors (including me) lost, but the community needs to draw a line and say enough is enough. Johnuniq (talk) 07:07, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

For those of you who say that Borda is a bad voting method, I say the time to object to that was before the vote, not after. And how were we supposed to do that? Recall that the voting began on Mar. 23. Later that day, after several votes were already in, a proposal to use IRV was rejected and a counterproposal for Borda was introduced, which was amended several days later to accomodate the majority of early voters who weren't casting well-formed Borda (or IRV) ballots anyway. If you want to enforce a particular voting method, decide which one before the votes start rolling in. Kilopi (talk) 07:51, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

In the interest of fairness, I'll note that discussion of the need for a ranking system began in the main page comments section as early as March 4 with no contrary opinions registered until formal proposals were put together. —chaos5023 (talk) 14:05, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Kilopi does have a point that Borda wasn't announced until after the voting began, but most of the objections to it were raised after the voting was over, which was counter-productive. Regardless, this whole thing has been an exercise in futility, and I would rather have a less-than-perfect result than continue with yet more discussions leading nowhere. Kaldari (talk) 18:01, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Then someone should just go ahead and implement something like my suggestion above. No one has spoken against it, to my knowledge, and several people have persuasively argued that redefining the articles' scopes in this way would do much to organically defuse the conflict.

This discussion has gotten to the point where I would follow my own suggestion if I had the time and energy to see it through. But, alas, I do not. Someone else want to pick up the ball? --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 18:10, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't have the ability to move an article over a redirect. —chaos5023 (talk) 18:57, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Reframing

I'd like to get people's feedback on the way I see the logic of this situation, which is completely unrelated to the culture war nonsense we seem to spend most of our time debating. Basically, it's two questions:

1. Should we cover the United States pro-choice and pro-life movements as distinct topics with their own articles?
2. Were the articles currently titled Support for the legalization of abortion and Opposition to the legalization of abortion originally about the United States pro-choice and pro-life movements?

The first question seems like a no-brainer "yes" to me. The second at least might be meaningfully debatable, but I'm pretty sure the answer there is a resounding "yes" too. (Hell, the vast preponderance of the actual content of the articles is still about those movements, rendering the current titles nothing more than a WP:COATRACK.)

And if the answer to both questions is "yes", then given WP:PRESERVE the only thing to do is clearly and unambiguously scope these articles to the topics of these movements.

And there are basically only two choices for this: Pro-choice movement / Pro-life movement, or United States pro-choice movement / United States pro-life movement. Abortion-rights movement and Anti-abortion movement are useless because they're ambiguous across every such movement in the world, and United States anti-abortion movement is useless because it's ambiguous between the pro-life and right-to-life movements. Pro-choice and Pro-life aren't even valid titles because they're freaking adjectives.

I've said parts of this from dozens of angles over and over, and as far as I can tell people have two responses: either they are convinced, or they talk past me like I never said anything. Nobody who's blown off the entire train of thought has refuted any of it. So I ask you: are there any errors here? Is there any reason this logic should not actually control in the situation? —chaos5023 (talk) 20:36, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Where you say "who's ignored", did you mean to say "who hasn't ignored"? --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 20:45, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

No. I mean that the people who've talked past me have failed to provide refutation. (One provided contradiction, but of a nature that's so ridiculously out of keeping with anything about Wikipedia's operation that I can't see counting it.) I've edited to make that clearer. —chaos5023 (talk) 20:47, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Okay. Anyway, I've said before that I agree with you. --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 20:59, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Yeah. :) I've now overhauled User:Chaos5023/Abortion coverage into an examination of this logic. I feel like it might have a chance of cutting the stupid damn Gordian knot. —chaos5023 (talk) 22:05, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Why not "US anti-abortion activism", to cover both pro-life and right-to-life movements? Many people (like me) won't understand the distinction, and I'll bet these overlap enough to fit in a single article. Homunq (talk) 15:32, 27 July 2012 (UTC) ps. Thanks for approaching this sensibly and putting your logic simply.

So United States abortion-rights activism and United States anti-abortion activism? That's not a bad thought at all. Its main downside is that it weakens the policy mandate in the reasoning; if we're twiddling the scope of the latter article rather than just restoring it, WP:PRESERVE doesn't present nearly so strong a call to action. Or, constructed the other way around, using those titles doesn't necessarily do the best job of following WP:PRESERVE. And we obviously want to have the strongest policy-based call to action we can get. But it arguably does a pretty good job. So thanks and you're welcome. :) —chaos5023 (talk) 17:21, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

A few more difficult points have occurred to me: their WP:COMMONNAME support is iffy (they're probably the common name for the exact topic they identify, but then we're writing about a topic that gets a lot less coverage-as-such than the more specific movements), they deny the movements the right to self-identify, and they identify the pro-life movement solely as an anti-abortion movement, which makes coverage of its various efforts at scope creep problematic. —chaos5023 (talk) 17:31, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

hmmm... I see. So "right-to-life" is focused on abortion only, while "pro-life" has non-abortion aspects. Well, what about United States abortion-rights activism and United States anti-abortion activism, with a dab at Pro-life activism which points to the latter and to other aspects (anti-death-penalty, non-US movements, etc.)? I think that there are probably more people who would identify as pro-life or right-to-life without distinction, than there are people who are holistically pro-life activists (active against the death penalty, against euthanasia, against war, and against abortion), so this solution would be justifiable in its focus. On the downside, I'm sure that there would be people on both sides who'd see it as unfairly biased against them... Homunq (talk) 04:19, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Doesn't really seem to help. Basically, the call to action that I'm seeing from core policy is that, if both the things I wrote above are true, then we should move the Two Problem Articles to clearly and unambiguously identify their scopes as the pro-choice and pro-life movements. The schema you're describing doesn't accomplish that. It provides for coverage of them, but not on WP:PRESERVE's terms. And I'm trying to frame the question I'm asking in terms of core policy as strongly as I can, so as to back-burner contra-encyclopedic culture war questions like "how can we say pro-life without saying pro-life" as much as possible. —chaos5023 (talk) 17:23, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Why do we need separate articles on "pro-life" and "right-to-life"? It seems to me that the boundary between them is pretty fluid, and that they could just be covered as different aspects of (in different sections of an article on) the "pro-life movement in the United States".

Also, where do you put people who are hostile to abortion to the extent of opposing government funding and any government involvement in improving access, but do not think it would be productive to outlaw it? Many prominent politicans (mostly Democrats) fit that description and should also be considered part of the pro-life movement. I thought the idea was to have one page on the philosophy and one page on the politics. If we subdivide too much, then it will be hard to find a place for everybody. --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 15:44, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Why we need separate pro-life and right-to-life articles: I'm not 100% certain that we do -- it was asserted in this RFC that they're meaningfully separate topics, but that's clearly debatable. If we do need them, it would be because they're distinct cultural phenomena, irrespective of their significant overlap in ideas, like the Suffragette movement and Feminism. Again, this is about encyclopedia building; focused coverage of distinct topics of interest is a much better idea for an encyclopedia than lumping things together in catch-alls. (At least, if those topics have enough RS material on them to support distinct articles.)

The basic idea is that whatever content isn't about the specific movements identified as topics would naturally factor to Abortion debate or one of the rest of the large (large!) family of abortion-related articles. The issue of people taking a pro-choice anti-abortion stance being part of the pro-life movement seems highly controversial to me, and I think if we're to get away from using these two articles as catch-alls we can't be coercively assigning people to them as categories; the focus would have to be on whether someone identifies as part of the relevant movement. When writing about McDonald's, we don't include material on random people named McDonald or random people who cook hamburgers; we write about the activities of the McDonald's Corporation. Same deal. Obviously the boundaries of a true political movement are fuzzier than those of a corporation, but if we identify the topics of these articles as movements, then, as I've said many times, they aren't about positions or philosophy. —chaos5023 (talk) 16:02, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

As I said at the very beginning of this process, the articles need to be merged up to Abortion debate and Abortion debate in the United States, or something similar, then you can easily work back and forth between argument and counter argument without getting too deeply bogged down in terminology. It was said before that this might bias it one way or the other, but I doubt that either side has any arguments which the other doesn't have an answer to. After that refactoring, I could support a 'pro choice in the United States' article and its opposite, or something similar, but those should only be very short and covering the dynamics of the movement itself, but not its beliefs. OwainDavies ^(about)_(talk) edited at 17:37, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Existing article structure

Here is the template that shows the existing structure of abortion-related articles.

This debate is about the two article titles in the second section - Support for the legalization of abortion and Opposition to the legalization of abortion - viz, should they be something else, like pro-choice movement and pro-life movement. The much-discussed Option 12 in the recent RFC was about having article titles like Abortion debate in the United States, etc. under the existing top-level article Abortion debate. The fact is, that there are already 50 articles with names like Abortion in the United States. There is not much that is nation-specific about abortion, other than the laws, debates and cultural attitudes within each country. It seems to me that the articles Option 12 wanted already exist, but for one word in the title of each. How much digital ink can be spilt on the naming of two articles in an array like this? Please, put all the US-specific stuff into Abortion in the United States, write up whatever you need to get off your chests about all the subtle splits there are within US politics about this, and stop pretending that this specific US debate is "worldwide". Surely? --Nigelj (talk) 17:02, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

I see that people are gathering below around the feasibility of this proposed RFC, and also that no one has commented here. I'm worried about the strength of feeling about the US coverage combined with the lack of discussion of the wider structural coverage issues. I believe that it was largely these structural issues, in the guise of 'option 12', that derailed the last RFC, once significant numbers of non-US editors were attracted by the public RFC. Can someone answer in simple terms where the proposed articles on United States pro-choice and pro-life movements (whatever they are called in the end) will fit into the structure above? What articles in the 'Movements' section will remain to cover the worldwide situation? How will we and editors of the future avoid duplication of coverage on issues, laws, history of laws, etc among the full range of articles? --Nigelj (talk) 21:47, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

If User:Chaos5023/Abortion advocacy movement coverage results in actions taken, the articles stay right where they are in the template, because they're about movements, just as the template categorizes them. Is this not obvious? There would be no worldwide "movement" articles because there are no worldwide movements. Worldwide perspective on the issues remains covered in Abortion debate and related articles. (We emphatically do not need paired, opposing general-advocacy articles, or as I've been calling them, dueling POVFORKs, and the fact that we've wound up with articles titled as if we did is the entire reason "Option 12" got traction.) If other regional abortion advocacy movements are notable and get articles written about them, then they get added to the movements section.

Incidentally, the odds of an RFC resulting in any useful resolution are inversely proportional to the breadth of its scope, so the more we try to hold a referendum on overall structure in this process, the more thoroughly we ensure its uselessness. —chaos5023 (talk) 15:49, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

It's where you say, "there are no worldwide movements" that I want to pick you up: there are not, but there are and have been 'movements worldwide'. The existing support article has sections "Abortion-rights campaigns worldwide, Africa, Europe, United Kingdom, Ireland, Poland, North America, United States". Where will all this material go, and be extended as time goes by? All of those campaigns and movements were not called 'Pro-choice'. If so many Americans want to have specific articles in en.WP on their two movements, that is fine, but that should not be instead of worldwide coverage. It sounds like we need four article titles - the existing two (worldwide movements and campaigns) and the new two (the US movements). It seems to be the latter two whose titles need an RFC and/or voting, not the former two. Picking up what I believe was an earlier point of yours, there may need to be another discussion about the technicalities of article creation vs article re-naming if it is a benefit that the US pair should inherit the database history of the existing pair of articles. --Nigelj (talk) 21:47, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

This all seems sensible - after we have got the premises sorted out. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 09:45, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

My first thought about the relevant non-US movements presently covered in these articles is that I would be happy to, myself, refactor them into Abortion-rights movements and Anti-abortion movements the second the US articles were moved. —chaos5023 (talk) 17:07, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh, and the general articles would be the new ones because of WP:PRESERVE. That's why premise 2 is in WP:RFC/AAMC, to resolve the issue of what WP:PRESERVE applies to. —chaos5023 (talk) 17:09, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

That does all sound fine, and thank you very much. But is it clear in the RFC? Would people entering that RFC from cold understand that they are voting on article names for coverage of the US movements specifically, and that all other movements worldwide will be covered in new articles proposed to be called Abortion-rights movements and Anti-abortion movements? The paragraph that begins "It is further specifically recommended to closing admins to disregard from any consideration..." seems a very long and convoluted way of saying the exact opposite, to my reading. --Nigelj (talk) 18:04, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Actions like the refactoring aren't discussed in the RFC because they're ancillary encyclopedia maintenance tasks that don't presently show any requirement for RFC-level discussion, and again, keeping the scope of discussion narrow keeps our chances of getting anywhere up. (Not that people shouldn't ask and have answered questions about what would happen afterward, on the talk page, but it doesn't need to be part of the RFC.) I think the central question the RFC is resolving is pretty clear from the language of the Conclusion: "Support for the legalization of abortion and Opposition to legal abortion should be moved so as to clearly and unambiguously identify their topics as being the United States pro-choice and pro-life movements, respectively". The paragraph you reference isn't addressing anything about how Wikipedia should organize itself (again, which we should address as little as possible because we're not trying to pre-arrange 27 layers of encyclopedia maintenance decisions for the community), it's asking closing admins to disregard knee-jerk anti-US-topic-coverage sentiment that isn't grounded in policy or rational argument. —chaos5023 (talk) 18:14, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Request to change closing status

Request to change closing status from "In Progress" to "Aborted".  :) I think we needed a little laugh. Seriously, though, should we consider changing it to "stalled"? It does not appear that progress is being made any longer. Ben Boldt 07:40, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

This is an embarrassment, even by Wikipedia "administration is chaos because chaos is administration" standards. For something that was treated as being so important that ArbCom took this sort of step to be mishandled, ignored, and now entirely dropped is really a shame. Get a bureaucrat to get Jimbo Wales to make a decision and be done with it. JJL (talk) 22:32, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

As you can see from the below section the arbitrators are looking at it. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 06:08, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

And I'll be pushing hard to make sure a sensible solution is reached in the near future. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 10:26, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Current status

Well when I walked away from this discussion back in March I presumed that we were on a sensible track that was going to lead to a good agreed upon result one way or another. Sadly that doesn't seem to have happened. A few comments.

• While the "alternative" voting systems (e.g. Borda, Approval and Condorcet) aren't as widely used given the large number of choices they were really the only option - I suppose Instant-runoff voting could have been used instead and that is more popular.
• While technically Borda is possible to game I think it would require a very high level of statistics knowledge to be able to perform successfully in a one-off poll such as this one. While I agree that approval voting or the condorcet method are both better the idea that the poll was gamed seems extremely unlikely.
• With regards to the closeness of the result if you take an "instant run off" of the scores of the top two choices then Pro-life leads by 53.0% to 47.0%, for comparison in an instant run off in the last presidential election in the US Obama got 53.7% to 46.3%, and in the last French presidential election it was 51.6% to 48.4% - and both those election was described as landslides. EDIT: Apparently the French one was only described as a "convincing win".

(This is not true... see "1. Regarding..." below) Homunq (talk) 12:08, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

• The Arbitration committee mandated that the result should be decided by vote so I fail to see why that wasn't followed through - it was obvious that the result was going to be reasonably close - at least to the degree of real-world elections.
• The current titles are clearly unacceptable as they have never gained a consensus. The current titles match options 5/6 in the poll which they only get 44.1% or 44.0% against 56% in an instant run off against pro-life, and they came 4th/5th out of all the possibilities - if you group all the "opposition to the legalisation of abortion" titles together that means that the current status quo came dead last in the poll.
• I would definitely not have picked pro-life/pro-choice if I had voted, but it won fair and square.

In my view there are a couple of ways forward:

• The admins who screwed up last time reconsider their verdicts (this may seem harsh, but Arbcom said that this was to be decided as a vote which wasn't followed through and a mess was left behind by the closing admins for others to clean up).
• That the poll is re-run using Approval voting or another "alternative" form of voting (i.e. not first past the post as it sucks) ideally after the number of options is pared down to be something more sensible.
• If one of the positions has a strong policy based argument behind it and the others don't then pick that as we did with China/Taiwan. But to be honest I don't believe the policy is suitably clear in this case - otherwise Arbcom wouldn't have mandated a vote. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 21:12, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

As the one who originally tossed Borda onto the table, the main reason is that the Alternative Vote (as IRV is known here) is absolutely not a good system for finding compromises in a polarised situation. This confusion arises because the moderating effect it's assumed to have is on candidate behaviour rather than on the system itself. When choosing between polarised options compromises that are few people's first preference tend to drop out before they can pick up transfers and the final result tends to be about which side of the polar divide people are on. Systems that allow potential compromises to be better considered are more preferable, but they have to be combined with a counting method and results table that is easy to understand, especially when the decision is going to be contentious. Condercet completely fails this comprehensibility test. Approval may be better but I think a bigger problem is the basic format that encourages people to turn up and assume it's a discussion rather than a vote and that adds to the mess that no-one is clear on how the decision is being taken. When the situation has reached the point that an actual vote is required it needs to be clearly structured and laid out in advance such as the Ireland article names vote of a few years ago. Timrollpickering (talk) 00:14, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

To be clear I wasn't doing anything more sophisticated than listing the voting systems I thought were better than first past the post - I didn't give it much thought beyond that :). It sounds like you thought it through well. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 06:22, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

1. Regarding the idea of using Borda scores to derive percentages (53/47): That's totally unjustified from any point of view. You use the term "instant runoff", which of course has a technical meaning, but even considered as just a runoff which is instant, is not what you actually did. A runoff is a one-on-one race between the top two, and in such a race, as the Condorcet matrix shows, option 2 would have beaten option 1 by 2 votes.

2. Regarding the unsuitability of Approval, I take Timrollpickering's point. This is exactly why I'd choose a system like Majority Judgment. If all voters are encouraged to class options into, say, 5 categories (strong support, support, neutral, oppose, strong oppose), the few votes which don't explicitly do so will generally be easy to interpret in such a fashion.

(If I could choose a system by fiat, I'd actually choose Continuous Majority Judgment, which generally gives the same outcome as Majority Judgment, but allows expressing that outcome using a single number for each candidate, a format somewhat easier to understand than MJ's tiebreaker. But since that's a redlink, I don't think that's going to fly. However, if MJ is used, I can offer to give the CMJ scores simply as an unofficial aid to help people understand the results.)

3. I agree entirely with Timrollpickering's assessment of IRV / AV. That would not be a good system here.

4. As to Borda: before calculating the results, I was afraid that strategy would lead option 1 to have an unfairly weak showing. Obviously, that didn't happen. But as the person who calculated the Borda results, I can say that I saw what seemed like evidence of both intentional and unintentional strategy, and that I really don't trust the results. In my opinion, Score Voting would have similar problems, but Majority Judgment or a Condorcet system would avoid them. Of those latter two, MJ clearly has easier-to-understand results. Homunq (talk) 12:08, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Well it sounds like the choice of voting systems choice is a lot more complex than I thought :). Regardless pro-life won the competition under the voting system we agreed beforehand, and even if the percentages I used weren't legitimate they do show it wasn't a trivial margin like 2 votes out of 1000 or something.

I have no particular objection to another vote being run with another form of voting - I thought I knew about this stuff, but clearly I'm only a beginner! -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 19:35, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm, not looked here in a while. Okay, I will ping the closing admins and hopefully we can figure out where to go next. Casliber (talk · contribs) 02:26, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

"The admins who screwed up last time reconsider their verdicts". Charming. Frankly, we were faced with what was effectively an impossible task due to the complete clusterfuck which was the way the voting and everything else were organised. The vast amount of time wasted by myself and everyone else on something that is (in the big scheme of things) utterly trivial is not worth it. Whatever we decided, would have been wrong. We are all volunteers here - if the people who actually give a toss about the subject can't be bothered to actually get their house in order, I don't see why anyone else should bother either. If anyone can produce a good way of resolving this issue, I salute you. Black Kite (talk) 21:48, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, that was helpful. Am I to understand that your solution involves pro-choice and pro-life advocates bothering to actually get their collective house in order? JJL (talk) 03:14, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

I do kinda have to say that if you were to pick any supportible resolution for this RFC, just out of a hat, you couldn't possibly be a fraction as wrong as the guy (Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry, was it?) who took the initiative in moving to the current title scheme. As to the organization of the RFC, I absolutely dare you to claim that you got handed a bigger shit sandwich than the people who were trying to actually create some organization were. —chaos5023 (talk) 03:32, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I am describing your behaviour as screwing up, and it is perfectly legitimate to do so - as that is exactly what you did. It is not a personal attack - it is a criticism of your actions where you left a giant mess for others to clean up. Moving it back to pro-life - a title I definitely would not have picked - would not have led to significant problems as it won the vote fair and square.

A lot of us, including the Arbitration committee, spent a lot of time trying to resolve this dispute - so it is totally not appreciated for you guys to just throw in the towel.

I'm perfectly happy to accept that you guys made a mistake, the Borda count is tricky, and there were lots of people mistakenly calling for the vote to only be a guidance. However you do have the responsibility to sort out your mistakes, that's what good customer service and being a responsible citizen of the community is all about.

To be clear I'm not content for you to just ignore this issue. If you guys don't manage to start to discuss a productive way forward by the end of the week I'm going to take the case back to Arbcom and ask for sanctions against the closing admins for failing to follow Arbcom's instructions and for violating WP:ADMIN as applicable. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 07:13, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm completely against sanctions, but I agree it was a total screwup. They had a hard, unenviable job, but instead of facing up to it (or asking to be replaced in a timely manner), they simply let it trail off in dribbles of too-slow responses. Bad show. Homunq (talk) 12:08, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

I think sanctions are up to Arbcom (so probably it was unfair to suggest asking for them) - but the case was that level before so I see nowhere else to take it if there isn't a solution here. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 14:00, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

I frankly couldn't care less what you're "not content with". I do feel sympathy for the editors like chaos5023 who have put a large amount of useful effort into trying to sort this problem out (and apologise to them and others like them for being forced away from the issue), but what what myself and the other admins have seen is a lot of editors who are clearly only interested in engaging with the process if it produces the resolution that they want. So feel free to report me/us to ArbCom - I certainly won't be losing any sleep over it. This will be the last time I comment here. Black Kite (talk) 18:00, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

The problem with this "theory" about motives is that if you actually look at my edit history on the topic you'll see that I have exclusively supported only alternative solutions to returning to pro-life as I thought they were better ways of resolving the dispute. The issue now is that a vote has been mandated and the communities viewpoint - which frankly differs from my own - hasn't been followed.

That you have accused other editors here of acting in bad faith hardly puts your behaviour in a good light. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 19:06, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

And in case you change your mind over the weekend you'll actually find that while I will take the case to Arbcom if necessary I don't actually want to do that and I would much rather avoid it if at all possible. A full retraction and allowing other admins to take a look would certainly be OK, as would any other reasonable suggestion (beyond dropping it which I don't consider reasonable). -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 19:35, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Calm please

Right I can see some frustration here, but can I just ask folks to take a deep breath and we can figure a way forward. I am raising it with the rest of the arbs again now. Casliber (talk · contribs) 22:40, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

I humbly suggest that the next time the ArbCom dictates a vote be held, they also dictate the voting method (and what to do in the event of a tie). Kaldari (talk) 23:32, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

I can see lots of good things and analysis, but some difficulties along the way. Somewhat more complicated than the West Bank naming issue we had a few years ago. Anyway, am giving it some thought. Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:26, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

@Kaldari with regarding voting systems that sounds like a good idea to avoid any future argument about which one is best, but I don't think that was a particularly big issue in this case as it was reasonably clear which voting system had achieved consensus. Closing an RFC at this level was always going to lead to some comments afterwards - the admins closing the discussion needed to be prepared to explain their closure in more detail to those people.

With regards to handling ties, that could probably be standard across all votes, I would suggest keeping the vote open (or re-opening the vote) until it is no longer a tie.

I would suggest taking both of these to the community to create a guideline - which can then be overridden as necessary. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 17:29, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Black Kite has declined to be involved and I suspect the others will too. I think reopening voting for a month is good. A larger number of preferences should indicate a smaller margin of error and thus a greater confidence in selecting a preference with a narrower voting margin. Then close to the time get three uninvolved admins to close it. Casliber (talk · contribs) 09:35, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps (I hope) I'm misunderstanding you, but simply reopening the voting seems a very bad idea. One reason this vote was so controversial is that many people (myself included) felt that the questions were not well formulated in the first place. For one thing, Chaos5023 has repeatedly argued that we should not be narrowly asking "what we should call the pro-/anti- abortion articles" but rather "how we should best define the scopes of the articles we should have on this subject". For another thing, what seems the most common-sense solution (see #Possibilities above) is not clearly an option available for vote.

I think only Arbcom can fix this problem. They mandated the format of the initial vote, and in the pre-vote discussions we did not feel able to move very far from that mandate. If Arbcom can think outside the box, along the lines of the things I just mentioned, and give us a more broad-thinking mandate, it might help. --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 13:27, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

• OK, three-and-a-bit months ago, I gave up the best part of a day of my life (as an unpaid volunteer like everyone else here) to read through this shitstorm and determine what conclusions, if any, were reached. I determined that there was no consensus (that's in bold on the RfC) and that if we wanted to establish a sufficiently strong consensus to lay the issue to rest, a second RfC should be held with a narrower question. I don't honestly think a different conclusion could have been reached by any sensible admin reading the same RfC. I also suggested that Black Kite, EyeSerene, and I close this second RfC iff the community and my colleagues were willing. Some were hostile to the latter suggestion. I don't recall any of the three of us offering to set up or facilitate the second RfC—I don't think it would be proper for closing admins to be intimately involved in the running of the RfC, so I'm not entirely sure why people are moaning at and about me.

  If somebody feels I should have done more than make a recommendation, I'd be happy to discuss it with them (civilly and bearing in mind that I'm a volunteer) here or on my talk page, but I have long been of the opinion that closing admins should make recommendations, and should not normally implement the outcome, which is what I have done in almost every RfC I've ever closed (and there are quite a few of those). HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 13:43, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

• Just, y'know, to make sure it's still out there, I'll mention that I have drafted such a followup RFC with a narrower question at User:Chaos5023/Abortion advocacy movement coverage. I have been bothering ArbCom about it with no particular results so far. It remains open to any input anyone else cares to provide. —chaos5023 (talk) 13:48, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

• OK, that's some progress. An RfC on the form of an RfC would be ridiculous, so I would say that if nobody has any vehement objections to that format and question, there's no reason it couldn't be made live. I will refrain from offering an opinion on the proposed form of the RfC itself because I think that would be outwith the remit of a closing admin. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 14:10, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

• The main question in regard to bringing it live is whether ArbCom chooses to extend the three-year binding mandate of this RFC to the followup; it's presently written as if that will be the case. If ArbCom does not so elect, then it'd seem to just be a matter of taking out that part. Maybe I will ping ArbCom again with the indication that that's the main question before them. —chaos5023 (talk) 14:25, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

• Except for the massive flaw with that is that it isn't a vote, which means there is basically zero possibility of anything useful being achieved at all. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 20:46, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

• I don't really believe that's the case. We find consensus from debate rather than voting all the time, and I'm fairly well convinced that the problems of this process (the whole thing, going back to the move to Abortion rights) are more to do with asking the wrong questions than anything else. So I'm trying to ask, if not the right question, at least a right question, and I think the policy case is strong enough that if the community is to reject it, it should at the very least say exactly why. I tend to think you're more hung up on the "vote" part than is going to be useful, anyway; even in Zhang's initial formulation of this RFC, it contradicted itself in saying that ArbCom asked for a "vote" in the header but describing a "notvote" in the community feedback section, and when I asked ArbCom for clarification on the "vote" issue, they basically said, "oh, we didn't mean a vote vote, it's all up to closing admin interpretation". I don't know how strong their initial call for a vote was (I don't know if the original call was weak and self-contradictory, or it was weak and self-contradictory after being filtered through Steven Zhang), but if there was any steel in it then, they didn't stick by it. And, y'know, at the end of the day there's a simple and not particularly tractable reason we don't conduct head-count votes on Wikipedia: sockpuppetry. —chaos5023 (talk) 22:10, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

• I disagree, and I will reply later today. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 07:06, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

• To expand, all consensus on Wikipedia generally means is that you require a super-majority to make any decision, unless the policy in question is particularly clear-cut. No closing admin is going to close a 45-55 decision as a consensus unless there is a very strong policy basis for the 55 position especially in controversial cases. Additionally without a strong policy based argument in one direction you are going to struggle to change people's minds - even with China where the whole of WP:AT was lined up to support the move we probably only persuaded 10-15% of the community to change their minds.
• While it is true that the merge option probably hasn't been given fully due consideration it has been given enough consideration that I doubt there will be a really strong policy based argument to back it up that hasn't already been thought of in the earlier stages of dispute resolution, so I'm not really sure what value not closing it as a vote offers.
• Furthermore if the Arbitration committee said they didn't mean it was a "vote vote" that does help explain why we are in the position we are, but that looks to be a mistake from Arbcom as well.
• Finally with regards to fraud, either it will be so small scale so it won't make a significant difference, or it will be blindingly obvious so then those votes can be trivially discounted. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 18:46, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

• Okay. I dunno, I wouldn't be horribly opposed to structuring User:Chaos5023/Abortion advocacy movement coverage as a vote, especially one based on Homunq's essay, I just didn't do so because as far as I could or can tell, the mandate for a vote from ArbCom is weak to nonexistent. —chaos5023 (talk) 14:21, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

• I really like Homunq's voting system - it seems well thought through. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 18:12, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

@HJ, firstly I don't agree with your comments about the time you spent. If you volunteer for something you take responsibility for it - and there are plenty of things in the real world that involve way more effort than a single day.

If you volunteer for Arbcom you can't morally just give up when it proves a little tricky - if you take the responsibility then barring extraneous circumstances you have to go with it.

Second, lets discuss the close. The close was proscribed by Arbcom as a vote, a scheme was enacted and there was a winner by more than 50% +1 vote. The end.

Over in the real world everyone accepts that, Al Franken doesn't have to share his senate seat even though he only won by 0.01% or 312 votes.

However thanks to the original no consensus close the only way of making it feasibly possible for a new team to rule on a close vote is if either the original admins retract their verdict or Arbcom issues a public statement saying that the original close was invalid (and lets face it, any other dispute where there is a vote that is closer than this risks the same problem).

Let's not pretend that a closer vote than the last one is unlikely, given the stage of dispute resolution it reached it is clear that the community is pretty divided on it - and therefore there is a pretty good chance the next vote will be closer.

And lets totally forget about doing anything other than a vote. If the policy was clear then a move would have been achieved here a long time ago, or the whole matter would have been put to bed. You are never at this point going to get a big enough majority to judge consensus as the losing side will blatantly complain bitterly unless it is 2:1 or something - which is never going to happen.

We also can't just bury it - and we couldn't when I started this discussion thread - this has gone on much too long to just do that, and there are plenty of things that people who are unhappy about the result can do that are far worse than merely potentially embarrassing a few admins. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 20:43, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

"There was a winner by more than 50%+1 vote": yes, if you used Condorcet voting, option 2 won by precisely 50%+1. Borda results can't be expressed in percentages; especially not the horrendous franken-borda which was actually pre-announced. Homunq (talk) 21:10, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Of course, drawing a conclusion using Condorcet would be applying a voting methodology that wasn't even under discussion until after feedback closed. And drawing it in favor of an option that should have been removed from consideration entirely because the titles it posits fail to unambiguously identify a topic. —chaos5023 (talk) 22:17, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't advocate retroactively using Condorcet. In fact, I strongly support listening to chaos5023; they don't necessarily have all the right answers, but at least they're asking the right questions.

I'm simply saying that the franken-Borda result does not support saying anything except who won the franken-Borda result. It tells you almost nothing useful about which option actually had more support. Homunq (talk) 00:28, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't think using Condorcet retroactively would be acceptable. Fundamentally there was a winner (which is all that 50% + 1 vote means) under the agreed voting system, which for better or for worse was "franken Borda". -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 07:06, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Point taken. But again: it may be all you meant, and that's OK, but it's not all that it means. None of us are Humpty Dumpty. (If we were, then I could say, my vote means what I mean it to mean, so retroactive Condorcet.) Homunq (talk) 19:27, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Sorry for being unclear. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 06:55, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

@Eraserhead: You have still yet to specify what you think I've done that I shouldn't have done, what you think I haven't done that I should have done, or what precisely you want from my presence in this thread, other than to blame me for what you perceive to be the failure of the RfC and/or of the three closing admins. That makes it very difficult for me to understand what you want from me, and so the chances of my being able to oblige (or even give what you might consider to be a useful response) are extremely slim. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 14:26, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

"Perceive to be the failure of the RfC"? Is someone putting forth the argument that there's another way to view it? I had assumed we all agreed it failed. JJL (talk) 03:30, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

What I would like the closing admins to do is to take responsibility for your part in the failure of the first RFC. You may have a point that I've over-egged the pudding and haven't allocated the blame fairly, but you guys are certainly at least partially response.

It would be great if you guys could help move this forward, but I'm happy to accept if that is too much to ask for.

I think it is fair to say that I have tried to make several important points here, some of which aren't your fault. Additionally I haven't expressed myself particularly well. All of which I am sorry for. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 18:12, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Clarifying again, where to from here

Right, I can state at the outset that in general the arbitration committee is a dispute resolution body and does not do good-faith content disputes. Thus we try as much as possible to get the community to resolve these as we're not "gov-com". Still, we need to succinctly clarify what our options are here. Eraserhead has proposed reopening the original discussion for further voting and Chaos5023 has proposed a more defined RfC. Can we clarify how folks feel about these two options and whether there are others we should consider? Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:23, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

If there's voting involved, I'm working on an essay of how that could/should work.

Other than that, I believe that the options should definitely be worked on. I don't agree with everything chaos5023 says, but I strongly agree with them that the options should be defined with an eye to setting scope for articles that will evolve according to that scope, not an eye to putting a name on the existing articles. Homunq (talk) 00:39, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Re-opening the original vote would be fine by me. I also think Chaos5023's more refined RFC would be fine as well if it is closed as a vote (I will explain later, but if we agree that it is plausible to gain a consensus I am happy to retract this), and if it is made clear that the original close is invalid.

I'm happy to change the voting system if we can gain a consensus to do so. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 07:09, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

My feeling from wading through this page is that there is more support for a more refined process rather than reopening the original one. More on the weekend. Casliber (talk · contribs) 10:15, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't see re-opening the vote as a good approach. If we must do this again, the parameters of the discussion and decision process should be made clear in advance and held to. Ideally, those who voted last time would be notified. It would be good to have a committed admin make a strong statement that he/she will make every effort to achieve a resolution--this is a tiring process at this point for all concerned. JJL (talk) 03:33, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

To be clear I have no problem with throwing out the whole thing and starting again, the whole process was less than ideal. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 06:56, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Right, after reading through the RfC, I think Chaos5023's RfC is good in that it fine-tunes some of the issues seen in the first so I think a result is likely. I don't think that the mountain of work done for the first RfC was in vain, and it has provided a good platform, both in terms of information and opinion trends to allow the development of this new RfC. Given all comments so far seem to indicate this is a feasible way to go forward, I think we should proceed with the RfC and notify everyone who partook in the first one, as well as place alerts in all the usual community venues. As voting is ongoing, we can ask for three more uninvolved admins to close. Casliber (talk · contribs) 11:59, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Obviously I support that. :) Can you get ArbCom to give a yea or nay on the extension of the three year binding mandate? —chaos5023 (talk) 15:23, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

What voting method are we going to use to close the new RFC? -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 18:03, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

(a) I will ask the other arbs, (b) I was reading the User:Homunq/WP_voting_systems#Desirable_characteristics which seemed to be well thought out. Do you have any opinions about that? Casliber (talk · contribs) 19:24, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

I think Homunq's proposed suggestion seems great. If that doesn't get agreement am happy with basically any system that is guaranteed to produce a winner - probably with the exception of first past the post. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 21:11, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

I like it a lot. The fact that it works with standard Wikipedia expressions of support, in particular, such that admins could use a standard reading of consensus or get a stricter mathematical view using this mechanism. One thing about User:Chaos5023/Abortion advocacy movement coverage, though, is that it isn't (and IMO can't) really be structured to try to "guarantee" a resolution, the way AAT tried (and failed) to, because of how it's based around a central policy argument. It doesn't and shouldn't do anything unless consensus is found in favor of its conclusion, and I don't think voting mechanics should necessarily be applied to that. Voting mechanics could be a great idea for analyzing the support of the title options if the conclusion does have consensus, though. —chaos5023 (talk) 23:19, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

AAT being Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Abortion article titles, I assume, rather than WP:AAT which currently [15] points to a page that does not seem particularly relevant. Andrewa (talk) 23:31, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

POVTITLE issues

Sorry for raising another objection, but there is an issue with that to do with POVTITLE. WP:POVTITLE states "When the subject of an article is referred to mainly by a single common name, as evidenced through usage in a significant majority of English-language reliable sources" (emphasis mine). from the evidence currently on the RFC page in the relevant sections and the evidence gathered at mediation and the list of sources initially gathered it looks like a toss up between the two name grouping.

I'm sure an WP:IAR based argument can be constructed to vote between the two most common names under the assumption that they both have POV issues, but are more common than other solutions - but I don't think we can rely on WP:POVTITLE explicitly - possibly we could with some re-wording/clarification.

It would certainly also be OK to just do a straight vote under the idea that the policy differences aren't so great. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 21:15, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

The way I look at it is, because of the highly unusual stance the worldwide press has taken in this particular area, we wind up with a situation where you can come up with a strong numerical case for formulations based on either "pro-choice/pro-life" or "abortion-rights/anti-abortion" depending entirely on how you slice and dice your assumptions about what's being referred to. (For instance, if we're talking about the US pro-choice and pro-life movements, some of the raw numbers for "abortion-rights/anti-abortion" have to be discounted because they're referring to non-US entities -- but how much?) Since this is possibly the only case of the international press making a systematic effort to deny self-identification to political movements (because of the hideously overdone propaganda nature of their self-assigned names), screwing up a situation where we can normally rely easily on sourcing statistics, it seems reasonable to me to read WP:POVTITLE a bit more broadly here. I pretty much wind up saying, since we can make a strong a case for either as makes no difference, we may as well treat both variations as if they had common name status and work from there. Though it is still potentially meaningful that the POV we're ignoring in the case of "pro-choice/pro-life" based formulations is much more extreme than otherwise. —chaos5023 (talk) 03:46, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, WP:POVTITLE describes the issue that we were considering with this RfC... which makes it a bit odd that most commentors seem to have ignored it during the RfC.

The question is this: is 'pro-choice'/'pro-life' equivalent to 'Teapot Dome scandal'?

To me the answer is "no", unlike the 'Teapot Dome scandal', there has been a concertated effor by many people to not use the terms pro-choice/pro-life, which means that while these names are still common they are not overwhelmingly so.

'abortion-rights'/'anti-abortion' is also common, but less common. It has also been argued that these terms are POV and imprecise (e.g. just because you think people have a right to an abortion, it doesn't mean that you are not against people exercising that right in most cases). So these names arguably fail both WP:POVTITLE and WP:PRECISION.

Which leaves us with a descriptive name. No one is pretending that a descriptive name is ideal, but it is the default when the other things fail.

So the only question remaining is a tough one: Which descriptive name to go for.

I think we need to spend time thinking about that... but I am currently feeling that 'Support for availability of abortion' / 'Opposition to availability of abortion' does best in terms of WP:PRECISION.

Yaris678 (talk) 16:20, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

I disagree, but I don't know that this is the most productive place to carry on the debate. Perhaps we should just make sure that the RFC we are planning includes a specific question dealing with whether "pro-life"/"pro-choice" is appropriate per POVTITLE. --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 16:46, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm not exactly clear on how anyone can legitimately argue that pro-life/pro-choice meets POVTITLE and that anti-abortion/abortion-rights do not. On the data we have gathered so far pro-life/pro-choice come out ahead sometimes, but so do anti-abortion/abortion-rights. Therefore that doesn't meet the letter or the spirit of the policy.

If we re-phrase the point in the RFC to say that there are essentially two common names which are both used more than any other then you can argue that the spirit of POVTITLE allows you to pick either of the two as a naked vote between them - and I have no problem with that- but that is a much more subtle point and the RFC needs adjusting accordingly.

EDIT: @Chaos5023, I think we basically agree, but I don't think the RFC as it is currently worded makes that point sufficiently well. I will try and have a think and see what changes can be made to clarify it. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 17:38, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

I think I took my argument too far for this stage of the discussion. For this stage of the discussion, the important point is that the statement "If and only if these titles are NOT held to have WP:COMMONNAME status: The strong POV inherent in these titles violates WP:NPOV, and WP:POVTITLE does not apply without WP:COMMONNAME" is slightly misleading in this context. It does not accurately give the meaning of WP:POVTITLE. "pro-life"/"pro-choice" are common names, they are more common than any other in some contexts but they are not equivalent to "Teapot Dome scandal". There is not a massive body of sources that consider "Teapot Dome scandal" to be a biased phrase that should be replaced. Yaris678 (talk) 18:17, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

It certainly helped me clarify my thoughts - so here's a diagram of what I'd suggest we do.

-- Eraserhead1 <talk> 21:18, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes. I think that flow chart captures the process really well... although I would probably phrase the first question "Are BOTH anti-abortion/abortion-rights and pro-life/pro-choice acceptable under POVTITLE?"

It shows how important WP:POVTITLE is so it is important that we don't misrepresent POVTITLE during the RfC.

Yaris678 (talk) 08:00, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

I've updated the flowchart. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 08:17, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Cool. Thanks. Yaris678 (talk) 09:59, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

What should we do now? Chaos5023 what do you think of my flowchart? Is it compatible with your ideas? -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 19:01, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Somewhat, kinda? It's similar in places to how I've conceived of things, and if you look at the earliest edits on User:Chaos5023/Abortion advocacy movement coverage, you'll see that I started down the road of trying to ask the "how should we organize the content?" question. I now consider putting that question in front of people a horrible idea because 1) it's way too far-ranging, which is related to how 2) it feeds into a mistaken idea that the movement articles in question, plus *maybe* Abortion debate, constitute our "abortion issue" coverage, and that we can usefully make decisions about the whole of our "abortion issue" coverage in this process; one look at {{Abortion}} should disabuse anybody of that notion; 3) putting the option of "just shovel it into Abortion debate" in front of people as if that weren't committing an enormous, completely indefensible notability fuckup (deciding for no legitimate reason that the US movements in question don't rate coverage) just encourages more brain-damaged "oh I'm tired of this process so let's just do something that sounds relaxing" decision-making 4) talking about "the content", rather than the coverage of specific topics, leaves "the content" as the amorphous mass, different to every participant, that has been destroying any hope of clear encyclopedia-maintenance decision-making on this topic for duration of the process 5) there are a couple of basic questions (Premises 1 and 2 from my draft) that, if we can agree on them, eliminate 99% of the bullshit and ambiguity in the situation. So basically at this point, I want to see the community either acknowledge those questions or say why not. If either of those two premises are rejected, then we can go back to the land of vagueness, no problem, but if we can nail down that we are deciding on what to title two articles about specific US political movements, not reviews of political philosophies or warehouses for whatever spin doctoring has come out of the consultants lately, then we have a question we can maybe answer, so let's find out if we can have that. —chaos5023 (talk) 19:28, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I need to ponder. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 20:07, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

It is worth considering results in the first RfC to figure out what can be safely excluded as lacking consensus support. Option 3 had little supports and more strong opposes than any other option. Casliber (talk · contribs) 03:38, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't think we should be heavily guided by that. As any pollster knows, the answer somebody gives is overwhelmingly influenced by how you ask the question, and this RFC did not manage to evolve to the point where it was able to communicate any valid question to people in a way that was heard over the nonsensical questions in their heads. If somebody is answering the question "how should we describe worldwide anti-abortion political advocacy?", of course they're going to strongly oppose a title that starts with "United States". (And there was a lot of, frankly, just plain stupid sentiment against regional topic coverage; I don't even know what to make of the guy who says we shouldn't have an article on the Supreme Court of the United States.) An RFC that works harder to actually ask a question instead of letting people substitute their own might generate very different results. —chaos5023 (talk) 05:11, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Chaos5023 (talk · contribs), many of the people that were attracted to this page by the publicity it got are still reading it. Accusing us of

• brain-damaged "oh I'm tired of this process so let's just do something that sounds relaxing" decision-making
• just plain stupid sentiment and
• being unable to hear for the nonsensical questions in [our] heads

is not compatible with high quality discussion. To some, it may seem more like trying to drive away potential contributors who may upset you even further. Please try to raise the tone, and give other people a chance to discuss here too. For example, I have raised some questions under #Existing article structure above that seem relevant to me, and have been ignored since July. --Nigelj (talk) 07:39, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm afraid disgust with people being Wrong on the Internet has long since become my predominant remaining reason for engagement with this process, and it's bleeding into my communication style. Thanks for the level collegiality of your feedback. I don't really think I'm anything in particular to do with the lack of response to your inquiry, though. —chaos5023 (talk) 15:40, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

OK, lets try and give a more detailed reply.

• Premise one is a fine question to ask the users, and clearly is an important premise.
• Premise two would be a fine question to ask if a suitable number of diffs is attached. As it stands I have no idea what the answer is - but if it is fairly straightforward if suitable diffs are attached.
• You need a third premise "premise three" to cover the POVTITLE issue i.e. whether using POVTITLE in the overarching way that applies to both pro-life/pro-choice AND anti-abortion/abortion-rights.

The final point has to be discussed up front so that people can't go with the "I use anti abortion in real life, therefore it is the common name, therefore it meets POVTITLE but because I don't use pro-life it doesn't meet POVTITLE" (and vice versa) line of argument that seems to be pretty common. I certainly happy to put this information into a summary table and I'll aim to do so over the next day or so.

I think at that point we are ready for our first RFC to confirm the premises and then we can move on from there, so I'm not going to discuss the rest of the RFC.

I still think we should close everything as a straight vote (and as they are all yes/no questions we can use first past the post) to make sure we close as consensus and don't get another no consensus close, and if there is fraud or accusations of fraud then we take that to Arbcom to sort out unless the winner is still obvious. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 15:54, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't think we can do "premise three" because I don't think it's valid to force on people the conclusion that POVTITLE is "both or neither" in this situation. I think people could still conclude in good faith that COMMONNAME and/or POVTITLE apply to one style of formulation and not another.

It's also not part of the infinitely most important question, what topic are we trying to identify? (It's part of how we decide on a title once we know our topic.) If we can cut out all the noise based on thinking we are or should be identifying global pro-and-con abortion-related sentiment as separate and opposing topics (WHY IS THIS STILL A THING? HOW CAN ANYONE NOT SEE THAT'S LIKE THROWING NPOV OUT OF A PLANE WHILE SETTING IT ON FIRE?) and other such nonsense, I kinda feel like the COMMONNAMEs and the POVTITLEs will be more or less okay.

I don't feel super strongly about the voting thing one way or the other. I'd say initiate a proposal on the talk page of the draft and let's get some Wikipedish-type feedback. —chaos5023 (talk) 16:10, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

I think that when the RFC goes into full-fledged discussion, and then voting, mode, further options could very well be added to any questions which for now seem binary. Therefore, I think it should still mention my voting systems essay as the way to resolve any non-binary questions. Homunq (talk) 16:13, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, yeah. I'm thinking of, rather than making them "Premises", having the questions of whether the POV inherent in "pro-choice movement/pro-life movement" and "abortion-rights movement/anti-abortion movement" may be disregarded as specific points of resolution (independent so that people can conclude about either, both or neither), with COMMONNAME and POVTITLE as arguments in that context but not necessarily the whole issue. That then informs the title options without necessarily being anything to do with the core Conclusion about topic. —chaos5023 (talk) 16:26, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

I think I have to disagree with you guys on both counts. On the point about not restricting opinions on POVTITLE all you will do is make it so that all the pro-life guys say that pro-life meets POVTITLE and that anti-abortion doesn't and vice versa.

If you are going to do that you may as well cut all the policy crap and let people make a decision on their favourite title based on whatever criteria they like.

I also don't really think the view that the US market is significantly different from the worldwide market in this area really holds much weight - and I haven't seen any evidence which backs that up.

With regards to allowing further options, part of the reason for the mess with the first round was the fact that there were really too many options to pick from, so I am highly dubious about allowing the discussion to become more nuanced and I think all you will do is have a messy conclusion. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 17:18, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

To add if a decision is made which allows people to hang themselves on POVTITLE then it will be trivial for someone to come in at any later point and challenge the decision on the grounds that POVTITLE was fundamentally misread as it is clear that POVTITLE doesn't allow one title to be picked over another as there is no clear "significant majority of reliable sources" backing up one name over another.

I suppose you can make a policy argument about votes, but at least there is a decent counter there which is that we tried our standard consensus process a number of times and it proved ineffective at actually producing a result. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 17:24, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

I think there were a number of reasons this failed last time. This includes "too many options", but also "policy issues weren't clearly enough expressed beforehand" and "bad voting system". I think we've made enough progress on all of these to do better now. That holds whether or not one or two more options are added in the (as-yet-unstarted) formal "discussion" phase of this RFC; we'd still have fewer options than last time. Homunq (talk) 18:16, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

As long as this isn't a back door for "anti abortion meets POVTITLE but pro-life doesn't" (and vice versa) that seems reasonable.

We should be able to get Arbcom to clarify the policy to avoid that problem though as it is obvious. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 19:32, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Table of anti-abortion vs pro-life etc

Class	Pro-life vs Anti-abortion	Pro-choice vs Abortion Rights	Pro-life wins	Pro-choice wins	Source
Google Books	320,000 vs 199,000	253,000 vs 220,000	Yes	Yes	[16] [17] [18] [19]
Google scholar	30,300 vs 20,000	23,500 vs 20,900	Yes	Yes	[20] [21] [22] [23]
Google news	13,400 vs 68,200	3,600 vs 20,900	No	No	First RFC
Google search	14,900,000 vs 4,700,000	7,890,000 vs 2,630,000	Yes	Yes	[24] [25] [26] [27]
NPR on air	Uses pro-life	Uses pro-choice	Yes	Yes	First RFC
NPR website	Uses anti-abortion	Uses abortion-rights	No	No	First RFC
AP/New York Times/Washington Post Stylebooks	Recommend anti-abortion/abortion-rights except in quotations/organisation titles		No	No	First RFC
Guardian/Chicago Tribune Stylebook	Avoid pro-life	N/A	No	—	old revision of first RFC and First RFC
Explicit source list	7 vs 17	9 vs 15	No	No	old revision of first RFC
Top ten US newspapers looked at by User:VsevolodKrolikov	0-2 vs 8-10	N/A	No	—	diff
Google news between 2000 and 2011	99,200 vs 59,200	N/A	Yes	—	Mediation
User:Born2cycle's look at sources	Unclear but pro-life is ahead	N/A	Yes	—	talk page

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Abortion advocacy movement coverage live

I've brought Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Abortion advocacy movement coverage (formerly known as User:Chaos5023/Abortion advocacy movement coverage) live, as its last updated timeframe for its structural revision phase begins today, WP-time. Please participate. :) —chaos5023 (talk) 03:38, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Good to see :) Casliber (talk · contribs) 06:21, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Seems sensible. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 10:48, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

I've mentioned it above, but I have concerns about the following paragraph from the RFC's lede:

"It is further specifically recommended to closing admins to disregard from any consideration !votes using arguments that grossly misapply Wikipedia policy. For instance, a !vote which argued "We should not cover United States regional topics or use United States regional titles, because Wikipedia should maintain a global perspective" should be disregarded, since this argument is completely incompatible with core policy, Wikipedia being able to function as an encyclopedia, or any understanding of how global perspective is achieved. However, a !vote which argued "We should not use United States regional titles, because these are essentially global movements which can be adequately covered by global articles" would be perfectly acceptable (though it is based on assumed facts which may or may not be true)."

In the discussion above, it seems to me that we have finally clarified that the articles whose titles are being !voted on are to cover the two US movements only. Two new articles, proposed to be called Abortion-rights movements and Anti-abortion movements, will be created and these will cover all the other worldwide campaigns and movements. I don't see how that is made clear to RFC voters from the paragraph reproduced above. --Nigelj (talk) 18:09, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

No good can come from encouraging the closers to disregard votes and comments because what the voting editor thought was a minor syntactical choice in a briefly worded vote doesn't conform to other editors' idea of high-minded Wikipedia analysis. What's being grossly misapplied here is a condescending attitude. This should not be a discussion just for the "old posters' club" members. JJL (talk) 02:16, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Guys, you should discuss that RFC on its talk page. —chaos5023 (talk) 05:16, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Do you mean at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Abortion advocacy movement coverage? Andrewa (talk) 23:23, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Right. The whole point of the phase it's in right now is collaborative development, so if there's something wrong with it, it should be discussed in its working space. —chaos5023 (talk) 14:40, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

This is in community feedback phase now. Anybody who's still watching this talk page should definitely head over and register an opinion. :) —chaos5023 (talk) 19:03, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Why are repeating a broken process over and over and over again?? This is madness. As has been proven multiple times, there is NO CONSENSUS on this issue. How is having yet another discussion going to change anything? The only way to settle this is with a vote and some closing admins who know how to count the votes. Kaldari (talk) 18:57, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

We aren't repeating anything. We're continuing to work to refine the question we're asking and its grounding in policy to the point where it becomes something the community can usefully answer. The current iteration may or may not be good enough, but screaming about how it's all useless because it doesn't follow contrary-to-wikipedian-values procedures that nobody but ArbCom can force to be used and ArbCom refuses to force to be used isn't going to help. —chaos5023 (talk) 19:14, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

The community can, at any time, reach consensus to vote on an issue - The new RfC should be "Do you support voting on this issue, and if so, what voting system". As long as there is consensus for a vote (or any other method of decision making), it isn't contrary to the community's values. Saying "let's spend a few more months talking in circles" is just going to cause further frustration and burn-out and certainly won't lead to any useful conclusion. Kaldari (talk) 00:04, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

If WP:RFC/AAMC closes with no consensus, I wholeheartedly welcome you to try to get community consensus to take a vote on anything, ever, and wish you ever so much joy of it. —chaos5023 (talk) 16:23, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Closing this RfC

Even though the discussion has been closed for half a year, this RfC still has never been officially closed. The closing admins—Black Kite, EyeSerene, and HJ Mitchell—have failed to write a closing statement or offer any kind of official assessment of the discussion and voting. This RfC either needs to be officially closed or new closing admins appointed. Kaldari (talk) 19:06, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Actually, it was closed several months ago with the only apparent result possible, given zero support from ArbCom for the use of binding voting mechanics and the annihilation of all will to engage from the named closing admins. Hence the rest of us moving on. —chaos5023 (talk) 19:12, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Not to mention the other problem it had: the preannounced voting mechanism was just kinda made up on the spot, and agreed to without considering any issues of voting/game theory. I strongly suspect that if I had not counted using the preannounced voting system, nobody else would have had the will and ability; and I, who did, vehemently opposed taking that method's results seriously (from early in the RFC; unfortunately not from before it). Homunq (࿓) 22:44, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Dare I ask whether there is a consensus to undo Kaldari's un-closing of this RFC? --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 23:07, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Kaldari's move is inherently disruptive, and requires no consensus to undo. If they'd discussed it beforehand that might be debatable, but as it is this is open-and-shut. Homunq (࿓) 23:09, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

So this RfC was closed by RoySmith on the talk page? How was he given the authority to close it? The closing admins are Black Kite, EyeSerene, and HJ Mitchell, none of which ever closed the RfC. And even if we accept that RoySmith closed the RfC (which I'm willing to do), he still needs to add a closing statement. Anthropologists in the future will want to see what the conclusion of the most epicly disfunctional Wikipedia debate in history was :) (In addition, the Current progress table still says "Closing: In progress".) Kaldari (talk) 23:54, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

It looks like Black Kite, EyeSerene, and HJ Mitchell are all still active on the project (as well as RoySmith). I'm going to ping them all to see if someone will officially close the RfC. Kaldari (talk) 00:40, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

If another RFC has been created, I don't see a problem with noting that this RFC has been superceded. It's pretty evident that the closing admins could not come to a conclusion on the outcome, apart from "no consensus" which isn't an outcome that this RFC should have returned. Steven Zhang ^{Help resolve disputes!} 00:57, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

That's fine with me, but they need to write "Result: No Consensus" or "Result: We Give Up" on the RfC page so that it is clear what the result is (without having to read through 20 pages of text). Otherwise, they could just come back 3 months from now and suddenly say they've reached a conclusion. Kaldari (talk) 01:03, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I've reverted my change to the RfC page, per Homunq's request. However, I would like to point out that at least three different things on that page state that a decision is still pending: The template at the top of the page, the "Current progress" bar on the side, and the template at the top of the Admin discussion section. We need at least one of the closing admins to state that the RfC is officially closed and no result is going to be announced (or else announce a result). Otherwise, any future RfC is potentially void. Kaldari (talk) 04:36, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Any idiot can see this RFC is dead and nothing is ever going to come of it. For anyone to treat a subsequent RFC as invalid because some of the Is weren't dotted and Ts weren't crossed on this one (which, given the total disengagement by the named closing admins, cannot be made to happen by any amount of fearful crying out) would be for them to treat Wikipedia as a bureaucracy, which it isn't. —chaos5023 (talk) 16:21, 24 October 2012 (UTC)