On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 09:26:20AM +0300, Marc Girod wrote:
>>>> "Jan" == Jan Kulveit <jk-wikitech(a)ks.cz>
Jan> we would like to elect something similar to ArbCom on cs
Voting is a bad idea.
...
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.
-----
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