On 1 July 2013 11:38, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Rick Falkvinge has been writing a book, "Swarmwise", on how the Pirate Party organised. He's been posting it a chapter at a time to his blog.
You know how Wikipedia/Wikimedia has (or had) the meme that "voting is evil"? This sets out why.
http://falkvinge.net/2013/07/01/swarmwise-the-tactical-manual-to-changing-th...
tl;dr: voting creates winners and losers, and losers are unhappy and disengage.
Okey having now read the thing in full I'm still going to disagree. Obviously there is the general concept that when people near the top of a project start to oppose democracy its time to get worried however that doesn't really apply to Wikipedia. What does apply is that its quite possible to create winners and losers without messing around with voting. This is a problem in that at least democracy is generally seen as a fair conflict with inherent promise that on a different issue you might win. By comparison people who feel they have lost without a vote tend to start feeling that the system is rigged against them. Sometimes they start blaming admins for everything.
His vote avoidance procedures also don't work to well in the context of wikipedia. The consensus circle would be incredible resource intensive by wikipedia standards and would hit the problem that generally 25 wikipedia editors have far less in common than 25 high level pirate party activists (monkey spheres and all that).
The resource use issue is the depressingly pragmatic one when it comes to wikipedia votes. Generally votes on wikipedia happen when we need a result either within a fairly short time frame (AFD FPC) or when the resource cost of the ongoing conflict is less than the cost of people being upset over the result (Danzig, Republic of Ireland).