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.
- d.
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.
- d.
And what is the difference when any Wikipedian with good sense avoids participation in any policy discussion unless there is massive consensus. Practical experience with anarchic decision-making shows that aggressive idiots rule.
Fred
"My approach for a very basic sanity check was to have three people agree on an idea as good for the swarm. One person can come up with ludicrous ideas, but I’ve never seen two more people agree on such ideas."
Umm not consistent with beening involved in a project of any size.
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.
- d.
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On 1 July 2013 18:18, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
"My approach for a very basic sanity check was to have three people agree on an idea as good for the swarm. One person can come up with ludicrous ideas, but I’ve never seen two more people agree on such ideas." Umm not consistent with beening involved in a project of any size.
It's not like he has an existence proof, like founding a successful political party or being elected to parliament with this stuff. {{cn}}
- d.
On 1 July 2013 19:11, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
It's not like he has an existence proof, like founding a successful political party or being elected to parliament with this stuff. {{cn}}
The parliament in question was the EU parliament. Even the BNP managed that. In addition during his time as leader the party was a single issue party which effectively allowed to to freeze out most ludicrous ideas by limiting the field to IP and making things highly unattractive to copyright maximalists.
However you of all people should know that there are more than two scientologists out there.
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
On 1 July 2013 20:47, Carl (CBM) cbm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
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>
In fairness the chapter does accept that democracy is okey for countries (because you can't leave them) although I would tend to disagree as to its reasoning as to why democracy was historically adopted.
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.
The slogan is pretty useful in keeping things that way.
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".
I would argue regardless of the wording used what is actually going on there is an attempt at an informed democracy which is probably the best we can hope for.
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).