On 1 July 2013 20:47, Carl (CBM) <cbm.wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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>
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.
--
geni