Talk:Highest averages method/GA1

GA Review

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Nominator: Closed Limelike Curves (talk · contribs) 02:34, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 11:09, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

Comments

This mature article is very carefully written and fully cited. Copyvios look extremely unlikely. The examples are well chosen to illustrate the differences between the methods. The technicalities are presented simply and clearly.

• The lead is fully-cited. This is not required at GAN, and is disliked by many reviewers. The main reason for citing the lead is where an article is controversial and the claims in the lead have been challenged repeatedly. If that's not the case here (it doesn't seem so) and there isn't any special reason for having them up here, then I'd suggest moving the refs out of the lead.

• The presence of Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and [Daniel] Webster (for some reason his forename is never mentioned: it should be) indicates both that there is a lengthy history to this subject, and that it is apparently mainly American. It would be helpful, and arguably essential, to provide a 'Context' or 'History' (or 'Historical context') which summarizes (in a few sentences) the political background to the creation of the method. The bare bones to be described and cited are that the US was created as a democracy; Jefferson was a founding father; it was felt necessary to have a proportional system to allocate seats in each state separately.

• It would be nice if the History could be somewhat internationalized, if (and this is a question) there are instances of methods or suggestions for them from countries other than the US.

• The History just described could well be illustrated with an image of Jefferson, if not of all three men mentioned; and perhaps with a political map of the congressional constituencies in Jefferson's time (showing where the seats were, i.e. the things to be allocated by the method). The mention courts have ruled that the choice between the two constitutes a political question and matter of opinion. could be slightly expanded to mention the state courts involved, and the US Supreme Court's ruling that PR is constitutional.

• A minor point is that the word "method" is used both for the whole article's subject and for each subsidiary procedure. Perhaps one might distinguish 'family of methods' and 'method', or something of that sort. We might need to rename the article (after the GAN).

Images

None. This seems a slight pity as it ought to be possible to find examples where a method has had a dramatic effect on real parties in a real country, which could be illustrated both with (real) data and with a photograph, but this is outwith the GA criteria. See also the comment about History above, which might be the best place for such illustrations.

Sources

• I note with slight concern that 9 of the 28 sources cited are by the same author, Friedrich Pukelsheim: that the first of these is referenced 21 times; and that all of these are from the same edited book. It does seem however that the scholar is well-known and widely-cited; and that the topic would still be unquestionably notable without him.

• [21] is correctly marked as a dead link. It has been archived (e.g. on 28 August 2016), so the ref should be formatted using the 'cite web' template and its three archive parameters.

• [3] is a book, and needs page number[s] for two of its instances.

• [6] is not properly formatted or completely cited.

• [9] is a book chapter; it is incorrectly and incompletely cited.

• Dates are shown as 'April 2008', 'July 10, 2015', and '1979-10-01', i.e. three different systems. Please choose one. Personally I'd avoid the last of these, as the format is ambiguous.

• Spot-checks are all fine.

Summary

There is very little wrong with this article and I hope to see it as a GA very soon. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:40, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

I believe the sources are fixed (let me know if I've messed any up). I think it'd be very interesting to see a "history of apportionment methods" article, but I feel like this one is getting too long for a substantial digression into the topic. Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 06:14, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Many thanks for fixing the sources. I'm not asking for a history article or "substantial digression". All that's needed here is a few sentences of historical context to meet WP:GACR, specifically

3a. "it addresses the main aspects of the topic".

It is not the case, as it feels as if you are implying, that mathematical logic is more important or more encyclopedic than the history of mathematics. The history from 1792 onwards is certainly one of the "main aspects" of the highest averages methods topic, along with the connection of the mathematics to the real-world matter of proportional representation in a legislature. The history need only be brief, as its function is to set the mathematics in its historical, political, and real-world context. Such context is not a "digression" but an essential component of the article. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:56, 3 July 2024 (UTC)