On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 6:38 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)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