Tomasz-
On Sat, Jul 26, 2003 at 05:13:00PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
There is no consensus to switch from using consensus to using voting.
There doesn't need to be. Such policy decisions are made, and have been made, by Jimbo.
Don't pretend you don't know how world works. Nobody has any "magical" powers over the project. It's open projects and if things will be done against will of contributors, people will just move away. Last time we had this problem with advertising, it ended with Enciclopedia Libre fork.
First, it is unlikely that a decision to use voting before starting a new project would inspire a movement of contributors against it, given that such contributors would be a small minority and scattered across all Wikipedias (notably, the decision by Jimbo to authorize a vote on the article count methodology did not have any such repercussions, nor will the vote on the new logo).
Second, any fork at this point is unlikely to succeed. The Enciclopedia Libre fork happened in the early stages of the Spanish Wikipedia (and great good did it do them -- they're using outdated software, and the Spanish Wikipedia just keeps on growing; they just reached 5000 articles). The larger the project is, the more difficult will it be to keep two forks in sync, and this alone discourages forking to a substantial degree. Of course, Jimbo would probably not make a decision of which he knows that it would alienate a significant number of users. But the type of decision we are talking about does clearly not fall into this category.
Regards,
Erik