On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 6:38 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
tl;dr: voting creates winners and losers, and losers are unhappy and disengage.
This is exactly why Germany announced that their next presidential election is going to eliminate voting entirely, and let the voters just argue about it until they come to an agreement about the next president. If they can't agree, the current president will be kept as the status quo. But at least nobody will feel like their candidate lost. </sarcasm>
The "voting is evil" idea has a kernel of truth: when a small number of editors are working on an individual article, it is better to come to mutual agreement on article content than to have lots of tiny polls about the content.
But somehow "voting is evil" spread to situations where consensus-based decision making is well known to fail, e.g. on community-level issues where hundreds of editors want to voice their input. Well, actually we do have a sort of vote on those, but we claim it "really" isn't a vote, and then we try to find someone with enough gravitas (a bureaucrat or arbitrator, in extreme cases) to judge the "consensus".
- Carl