Voting at Wikipedia good, bad, neutral, necessary evil, unnecessary evil? This came up yesterday, but I know it's not the first time.
I'm not proposing an answer -- but I do have some general thoughts on the matter. I'm involved in a number of nonprofit organizations and they operate in different manners -- and I use that experience as a basis for my thoughts on this. Here are 3 basic ways they work:
A) Seek Consensus, But Vote: For example, most of the organizations have a board of director that votes and uses majorities when necessary, but most hesitate to accept a vote if it is close, and they prefer to achieve something approaching consensus, but will accept a decision if there is a large majority (this seems similar to Wikipedia).
B) Simply Vote: A few organizations use pure majority rule -- but this is not very common in the organizations I'm involved in.
C) True Consensus: One organization I work with -- the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is based on Quaker beliefs even though many of the people involved are not Quakers -- and there we work completely on consensus. Sometimes that means that it takes months or years to make a decision, but that is OK at AFSC.
I definitely believe as a matter of principle that consensus is the best way to operate, even if it can be slower. And I want to mention that with Quakers and at AFSC, people are completely committed to consensus -- and that means that people also know that it is a very big thing to block consensus. So for someone to block consensus, they must believe that it is extremely important -- for example, something that is opposed to the overall purpose of the organization (at AFSC) or to the spirit of the meeting (among Quakers and "meeting" can be read as "congregation"). It is very unusual for someone to block consensus, because people realize that the process is as important as the decision in many ways -- both for the specific issue at hand and for the organization or the meeting in general. So it might not be too easy with so many Wikipedians who like to argue about *everything* ;-)
So I am still ruminating about what I think is the best way for Wikipedia to function, because it is difficult to pin down *only one way* -- or even two or three that Wikipedia approaches decisions and conflicts, and therefore come to a conclusion about the best way to decide things. It seems that people prefer to have rules -- or at least to have guidelines -- to decide what is acceptable and unacceptable (I do as well). However, this is a positive feedback loop for those people (who will make more and more rules), and but will also drive away people with other focuses or personality types in a negative feedback loop (see http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points/). But as the project continues to increase in size and scope, and as more types of people join, it is not as clear what is the best way to proceed.
Primarily, I think that we need to think about the concept of voting and how it affects group processes. Wikipedia is an unusual hybrid of Wiki, NPOV, *and* altruistic self-interest (i.e., we all get some satisfaction from what we do here, but we also do it for the good of the project/community/world). I also think we need to look at how our decision-making processes affect how much we are open or closed -- we can be "open" to everybody, but if only one type of person can handle being a contributor or editor, what does that really mean for us.
Anyway, I have been reflecting a little bit about what I should focus my energy on -- and it seems like I should be writing articles and *not* checking Votes for deletion fifteen times each day. But I also feel that it is important to pay attention to the housekeeping work also, and that often takes me back to VfD and to Recent Changes. But I do think that we can bring something positive to articles and be NPOV -- but I find it hard to decide the balance between *contributing* and *housekeeping*.
And here's one more good link to check out: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiLifeCycle. I think we might be somewhere near 17 (Wiki:DeclineOfCivility -- there are more strangers than friends, and AssumeGoodFaith fails as reputation is fleeting) and 18 (arrival of the PoliceForces)
Anyway, that what I'm thinking today -- but tomorrow it may all change ;+)>
Brian
At 27 Oct 2003 17:50:32 -0800 (PST), Anthere wrote:
Someone wrote me offline, to ask me what I thought of voting, because he noticed I rather rarely did, in particular very rarely on vfd. He pointed out that mail from Ec and TC to me.
On Behalf Of Brian Corr
A) Seek Consensus, But Vote: For example, most of the organizations have a board of director that votes and uses majorities
when
necessary, but most hesitate to accept a vote if it is close, and they prefer to achieve something approaching consensus, but will accept a
decision
if there is a large majority (this seems similar to Wikipedia).
Yes, this is one of the things we're trying to pin down with VfD policy revisions: see [[Wikipedia:Deletion policy]] and [[Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy]] for exact details, but we are going with majority vote, and qualifying voters.
One reason why true consensus doesn't really work in Wikipedia is that voters are not stakeholders, as in your example of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The ease of editing in Wikipedia means any passing joker can throw a pebble into the gears and jam the system. So true consensus works only in a membership which is filtered in some way, or voters are stakeholders in the result.
So in the revised voting procedures for VfD, we try to filter or distinguish stakeholders from ballot stuffers -- valid voters must have existed for a while (days to weeks) and have made 100 article edits. This seems to be a reasonable enough of a requirement to make sure voters are stakeholders in Wikipedia's coherence. This isn't the first time, the Logo vote (gasp!) also stipulated voters have at least 10 edits to their name.
-Fuzheado