Jonathan Walther wrote:
I pick both. Benevolent dictatorship where the
dictator listens to and
respects the voice of his constituents works quite well. It amounts to
concsensus; to retain power, the benevolent dictator has to come up with
solutions that everyone can live with.
Well, yes and no. I'm the benevolent dictator here, and I think I do
a good job of listening and trying to work to address a variety of
concerns as best as possible. But I don't have to do this to retain
power, really, except insofar as if I do a sufficient bad job, everyone
will run away and refuse to play with me anymore.
There are a number of problems with our current model:
1. Determining when there is a consensus is difficult. On most
issues, we end up with a solution that approaches unanimity -- this is
the wiki way. But on some issues, it's sort of hard to say. People
end up going along because they have a commitment to the overall
*process* (i.e., they like me, and like the job I do generally, to a
degree that they are willing to put up with some decisions that I make
that they don't agree with).
2. Our current process doesn't scale well outside English. When a
controversy breaks out in English and the noise gets loud enough, I
can spend a few hours going through edit histories to try to determine
what happened. This gives good people an incentive to be on their
best behavior, because they want to make it easy for me when I have to
judge someone.
But I can't do this in Swedish, so I have to listen to two sides of an
argument where it sounds like both sides have behaved badly at times,
and I can't figure out who started it, who is likely to continue it,
and so on.
When you have votes on the other
hand, the will of the majority can make things so unlikeable for
minorities that they just up and leave.
One of the things that Eric pointed out to me is that thinking of
voting as a simple "majority rules" (i.e. 50% plus 1) is too
simplistic. I _totally_ agree that 50% plus 1 would be a horrible
rule, and likely to end up being a tool to close out minority voices.
But there are other forms of voting (Condorcet's method, approval
voting, etc.) that don't suffer from all the same defects.
Having said that, I still have grave reservations about using voting,
reservations that derive from the incentives to "political" behavior
that voting almost surely involves. Under our current system, all
parties are forced to look for solutions that will be satisfactory to
almost everyone, as opposed to merely looking for solutions with a
large enough constituency to pass a voting threshold (and screw the
rest of them!).
Did anyone ever notice that Kropotkin said Russian
villages used to run
entirely based on consensus, without any voting? Too bad the communists
destroyed that lifestyle; I'd like to see firsthand how they managed it.
I suspect it was because everyone shared a common culture, language, and
religion, and had known each other all their lives.
And of course this is precisely what we don't have.
Having said all of this, I think that I would find very useful a way
that I could formulate alternatives and have people formally register
preferences, with the understanding that it's an experiment. A tool
for more formally recognizing consensus. And then that tool might
eventually (with experience and changes as necessary) be more
formalized.
I'm a big fan of the notion of a constitutional republic. Majority
rule is morally repugnant. But some form of consensus voting, with
the protection of a "constitution" or "bill of rights" for all
wikipedians, rights that can't be taken away without some
super-extraordinary voting procedure, will probably be the way to go,
someday.
--Jimbo