On 10/27/02 2:29 AM, "Jeroen Heijmans" <J.Heijmans(a)stud.tue.nl> wrote:
I've not really been following the
"international" debate, but I read most of
the recent stuff about
voting. Some Wikipedians, notably Cunctator, seem to think that "voting is
evil", and link to some
wiki about meatballs for some arguments.
Please give the dismissive tone some time off. Wikipedia is a silly name
too.
So, suppose voting is evil. Then how do we make
decisions? Because with the
current number of members on this list, there's never going to be something
like consensus.
That's simply not true.
Endless discussions are tiring and getting us nowhere.
It may be tiring, but it's hardly getting us nowhere. Ideas and thoughts
have steadily been introduced and refined.
Already we are getting loads of e-mail about
one single topic like internationalisation; imagine how it would be with even
more Wikipedians and, hence, mailing members? That would be terrible, and I
would probably not even attempt anymore to follow any discussion after the
first few reactions.
More discussion, terrible? Generally more members of a
community doesn't
really mean that discussions go on for that much longer, as there's a law of
diminishing returns on new differences of opinion.
It's certainly not a bad thing if it were the case that as Wikipedia grows,
decisions are made more slowly. If they stop being made, that would be bad.
But a certain degree of inertia on the decisions that need to have a
consensus, rather than the majority of desicions that can be made by
individuals (that is, the actual editing of the articles, for the primary
example), is hardly bad.
The discussion will die without any solution or will
continue endlessly.
I don't think that's ever been the case.
That's not a desirable situation. Voting could
end
discussions. But "voting is evil", so what to do then?
Are you willing to admit the basic problems with voting?
An example of how consensus rather than voting can work is in progress at
[[Wikipedia:Bots]].