Talk:Biproportional apportionment

Name of this article[edit]

"Fair majority voting" is an euphemism par excellence. In the German Wikipedia, this method is called "Pukelsheim method", because this method has been proposed by Friedrich Pukelsheim. Markus Schulze 15:19, 17 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it stands to reason that whoever invents a new system would prefer to call it "Truly Excellent Voting System" than "Complicated Irrational Minority Balloting". The question is, what is the common English name for this system? Here's some relevant Google results:

"Fair majority voting": 4680; though on the first result page, 1 of the 10 results does not refer to this method, being just a coincidental "... while xxxx is not fair, majority voting is ...".
"Fair majority voting" proportional: 2330. I think it's safe to say that the number of pages using this term for this method is probably higher than this number. While some small fraction of these 2330 might be coincidence, they'd be balanced by references to the system which didn't happen to use the word "proportional".
"Pukelsheim method": 4 hits, of which 2 refer to a method in set theory. (I'm not sure if it's related mathematically, but it's certainly not the subject of this article.) Of the two hits which do refer to voting, one of them translates it slightly differently than Schulze does, calling it the "double Pukelsheim method".

From the numbers above, I'd say it's pretty clear that "Fair majority voting" is the correct name for this article. Still, Markus, if you'd like to add some disclaimer about how the fact that it has this name doesn't actually mean the results will always be "fair" or "majority", I'd consider it as an improvement to the article. Homunq (talk) 16:11, 17 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The name I know for that method is "biproportional" (method). A google search shows good results for that name. But, could you please check whether this name is commonly enough? (I don't know exactly how you weight the hits for relevance). --Arno Nymus (talk) 18:43, 17 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm... while Google takes some convincing not to redirect searches for "biproportional" to "proportional" (grrr) I eventually got the following:

+"biproportional" voting: 11,300 results, and the most common noun for this adjective to modify is "apportionment"

I think that shows that "Biproportional apportionment" is the best name for this article. However, there's a slight problem: this actually refers to a class of systems which are proportional along two abstract "dimensions" (characteristics). Fair Majority Voting is the system where those two dimensions are party and district; but biproportional methods also include cases where the dimensions include gender or ethnicity. (I wouldn't be suprised to learn that New Zealand had used some form of party/ethnicity biproportionality, for instance). So I think this article should be moved to "biproportional apportionment", with the current article contents as a section called "fair majority voting"; but that takes a bit more rewriting than I'm ready for now, so I'd welcome it if anyone else wanted to start the other article to make room for the merge. Homunq (talk) 19:08, 17 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

So, I moved this to Biproportional apportionment and wrote a first version of the incorporated version as proposed. So, I think, this issue is resolved. --Arno Nymus (talk) 00:21, 18 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Great job! Homunq (talk) 03:35, 19 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]