"Evaluative" and "Comparative" are good descriptive names, especially for 
nontechnical use.

There are many different needs for names. For informative nontechnical needs 
the names should be stable and understandable. For research needs the names 
should be stable and exact. For marketing needs the names should be biased to 
support the marketing message.

On the research side (I count EM list basically in this category) whatever 
names are ok. You may like or dislike criteria like FBC, but that should be 
based on the properties of those criteria, and not on e.g. the impression that 
someone might "betray his favourite". The methods and criteria could be defined 
also with other more neutral words. For example FBC could refer to "modified 
ordering" or its scope could cover also tied rankings.

I hope that slow evolution will find the best (close to single) names for 
informative nontechnical needs. On the reseach side the first proposed names 
are usually the best names, unless there is a need for clarify. Marketing is 
likely to run its own paths, with possibly competing approaches to name and 
categorize the debated concepts. I note also that different societies do have 
different needs for namig, also for other than marketing related reasons (e.g. 
historical familiarity based reasons).

Juho



On 21.6.2012, at 2.42, Jameson Quinn wrote:

> There's been a recent discussion on the mailing list for the Election Science 
> Foundation (the organization which promotes range and approval voting) about 
> what to call the category of cardinal voting systems. "Cardinal" itself is 
> too technical, and doesn't suggest any real meaning to a nonmathematician. 
> Various options were considered, but the options with the most support are 
> "graded voting", "grade voting", or "evaluative voting". These would contrast 
> with "ranked voting", "rank voting", or "comparative voting" for ordinal 
> systems.
> 
> Personally, I favor "Evaluative" / "Comparative". "grade" and "rank" both 
> have many different possible meanings (some of which are confusingly 
> synonymous, or discouragingly negative-valence), and "grade" is also used 
> differently between the US and UK. "Evaluative" and "comparative" are 
> immediately understandable, as the refer to how you have to think in order to 
> vote, not just the marks you make on the paper. They translate well to 
> Spanish, French, or other Romance languages. They are generally 
> positive-valence words. On the down side, they have a lot of syllables; but 
> on the whole, I think they're the best words.
> 
> But of course terminology only works if it's shared. So what do other people 
> here think about this?
> 
> Jameson
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