Sheldon Rampton wrote, about voting systems:
No, but they suffer from other defects. In 1952,
Kenneth Arrow, a
professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, proved this
using an "impossibility" theorem which showed that no voting system
is completely free from counterintuitive incomes.
*nod* And this has been one of the central points in my past
opposition to voting systems.
I disagree with the notion that majority rule is
morally repugnant,
O.k., then we're likely so far apart in political opinions that we'll
have a hard time agreeing on very much. If 90% of a population is
white, and votes in fair and open democratic elections to impose
rights violations ("separate but equal" or worse) on the 10% that is
black, you'd consider that a morally appropriate outcome? I don't
think so, but that's what I mean when I say that majority rule is
morally repugnant.
but the concept of "democracy" doesn't
really fit that well with
Wikipedia anyway. If we were serious about "majority rule" for
Wikipedia, we would need to have some system for ensuring the
inclusion of a representative sample of the population being
"represented," and that would mean, for starters, finding some way to
include people who don't have access to the Internet (currently 90%
of the world's population). Obviously, there aren't resources
available to do this.
But this doesn't follow at all. The relevant population represented
is *not* the entire population of the world, nor the entire population
of the Internet, nor even the entire population of our readers. The
relevant population is *us*, people active on Wikipedia. That's who
the rules are for.
I think Wikipedia currently functions quite well,
despite never
having bothered to develop a philosophy of governance.
I think it's a mistake to say that we have never bothered to develop a
philosophy of governance. We have. It's just that the result is that
it has worked very well for us to keep things pretty informal.
--Jimbo