Geoff Burling:
Voting on Wikipedia to settle issues won't work because the opposing sides are usually so certain that their opinion is the right one, that they will not accept an adverse result from a vote.
You're describing the current situation where there is no defined decision making process on equal footing with our other core policies. If one could say "This vote was held in accordance with the rules on voting in content disputes", then anyone who acts against it without good reason (e.g. fundamentally new information or arguments that would justify a new discussion) would be in violation of policy, and the traditional means of enforcing good conduct would apply.
The tricky part is to define a policy that does not have a negative impact on our traditional consensus finding processes. There are good reasons why many people are skeptical about voting: - sock puppetry - voting before discussion - voting with options that influence the results - voting with overly complicated or flawed methods - voting without a way to ever question the result etc.
However, an anti-voting dogma exacerbates the problem because it leads to the aforementioned club-like structures that will always be susceptible to long-term corruption, and because voting, where it *does* occur, cannot happen according to a standardized, tried and tested set of rules; instead, the same mistakes are repeated again and again, and nobody knows when a vote should be considered binding or not. Any relatively new user can be easily intimidated with a vote, while someone more familiar with our processes can easily question it. This is an undesirable imbalance.
Erik