On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 09:26:20AM +0300, Marc Girod wrote:
"Jan" == Jan Kulveit jk-wikitech@ks.cz
Jan> we would like to elect something similar to ArbCom on cs
Voting is a bad idea.
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I believe VotingIsEvil vs. VotingIsGood debate is off-topic here, so it would be better to move further replies to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_vote_on_everything or private mail.
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I usualy find myself advocating the "VotingIsEvil" and "DoNotVoteOnEverything" positions. I consider e.g. nonexistence of "Vote on desysoping" on cs: as achievement :-)
But in this case, please take as a premise we want to create something like en: Arbitration Committee and the question is how to do that. Well known alternatives are 1) members appointed by some higher authority. This is problematic in non-english language wikis, because higher authorities such as Wikimedia Board or Jimbo propably don't have enough inside in the community. 2) public elections 3) secret elections I can imagine other possiblilies, e.g. members randomly selected from active wikipedians, but we dont want to be much original in this case.
AFAIK 2) was used on fr:, 3) on en:
IMO 3) is better than 2) for number of reasons. The most prominent - arbitrators should treat all users equal, no matter how they voted, and this principle is better guaranted by secret elections. Public voting IMO encourages creation of parties and coalitons more than private voting.
Additional question is, if elections, which voting system. That was discussed in great detail before en: ArbCom elections and I think it worked fine. => Taking the voting software a vote counting algorithm from en: is IMHO the best option now.
Jan Kulveit