About Electorama!

This is story is about Electorama.com, which started off as a blog, and then turned into a wiki, and then moved over to Miraheze. I got this published just before the July 4th publishing deadline… (UPDATE August 4 — it would seem that the Electorama! space on Medium has not taken the world by storm)

My original Electorama! logo that I created back in 2003. I don’t think I saved the SVG copy of this anywhere, but I’ve been hunting for it!

Happy 4th of July! As anyone who knows anything about web design is concerned, Electorama!’s main homepage is a disaster. I kinda want to fix that.

This is roughly what Electorama looked like in 2003. The logo was up the top left. There was an RSS feed of the Wikipedia “Voting systems” proejct. I don’t think the CMS I was using back then is still available, and even if it was, I’d have to find the SQL dumps to revive it. I found this thanks to the folks at Internet Archive (see the Wayback Machine link I used here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20030321194051/http://www.electorama.com/>)

The urgency of this task has been accelerated by The Center for Election Science. A week or so ago, C4ES (as I call them) decided to close down forum.electionscience.org. You can read all about it in Felix Sargent’s announcement on June 25th.

There are a lot of choices of online forums. I think that Mastodon is really cool, but not very many of my friends seem to use it.

We need a replacement, but what? Should everyone move their writing over here to Medium? Or to Quora (e.g. to the Electorama! “space” over there). My personal profile (quora.com/profile/Rob-Lanphier) is kind of difficult to tell apart from my personal space on Quora. Should we get our own blogs (e.g like robla.blog)? Should everyone get their own wikis (e.g. like robla.miraheze.org)? Should we continue sharing a wiki (e.g. like electowiki.org)? Maybe we make a “publication” over on Quora (like the Electorama! publication on Medium).

I’ve really enjoyed working with the folks from The Center for Election Science. Their website is at electionscience.org

What about interactive discussions? Should we go back to using Mailman 2.x (e.g. like the election-methods mailing list)? Should we use Discord (e.g. like C4ES’s Discord)? Should we rely on electowiki talk pages? Like I said: there’s always Medium.

There’s a lot for us to consider as we start shutting down forums. MediaWiki wasn’t designed to be a forum, and yet some electowiki users want to use it as one.

Wikimedia Foundation’s official website is at wikimediafoundation.org.

Electorama.com doesn’t have nearly as large of a “Trust and Safety” team as the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has/had, and they seemed to have a pretty complicated process for responding to problems on Wikipedia. At least, that was the case when they banned User:Fram last year. I truly haven’t followed the whole saga, and I have no idea who “Fram” is. I heard through the grapevine that it was a big deal when it happened, and there was a lot of gossip in San Francisco about it. I don’t know how large WikimediaFoundation.org’s Trust and Safety team is, and how much of a big deal it was outside of SF. Regardless, Electorama.com is based out of San Francisco, and hiring folks here in SF is pretty expensive. I don’t think I can hire a Trust and Safety team for any forums that I decide to host.

See miraheze.org to learn more about Miraheze

I really appreciate Miraheze, and whatever it is that they’re doing to make sure that the wikis they host aren’t completely overrun. electowiki.org has calmed down recently, but there was a few months here recently where it was getting hard to manage.

Anyway, there are a lot of people setting off fireworks immediately outside our house. So it’s getting a little tough to concentrate. But I’m looking forward to the discussion about this.

(UPDATE: July 5. I made my midnight publishing deadline, and there’s still a lot of fireworks outside the house, but it’s not the 4th of July in San Francisco anymore as I write this update)