On Monday 16 August 2004 21:33, (Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales) wrote:

Voting can be a reasonable way to resolve issues for which absolutely no other solution can be found. But I very much doubt that introducing a system where people vote on article content is a good idea.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. You make a good argument, and I agree that consensus is always the ideal we'd like to strive for and maximally encourage in the incentive structures - but like Andre Engels, I'm skeptical that consensus always works. In practice, voting is already used informally on Talk pages all over the place on Wikipedia to resolve contentious issues in which consensus breaks down; voting is even somewhat systematized already via the whole "Votes for deletion" mechanism.

I have no desire to replace "normal-case" consensus-based Wiki collaboration with "tyranny of the majority"; my intent is only to come up with a better alternative to the existing, essentially authoritarian fallback mechanism of sysop-controlled page protection for those "extreme cases" when normal consensus fails.

Let's imagine that 90% of the people editing a particular page are of one opinion, and 10% are of a different opinion. So long as the participants are all reasonable and friendly, this poses no obstacle to the production of an article that is satisfactory to all -- this is the normal wiki way of producing quality encyclopedic content.

The majority has no choice but to respect the viewpoint of the minority, because the minority can always just _edit the article_.

Is this really the case? Suppose I'm the only one who votes to "Keep" a particular page on VfD, and nine other users vote "Delete". Should the page be deleted? If so, my rights as one of those 10% minorities are being trampled! If someone does delete it, am I then justified in just re-creating it? That's what your statement above seems to suggest - yet I suspect that if I did that repeatedly, sooner or later either the page would be protected, or I'd be kicked off for "incivil behavior" by an annoyed sysop. Is this not the case?

My point is that in the system even as it stands, voting is already used frequently as a fall-back path when consensus breaks down - and when that happens, the minority is _not_ really free to disregard the results of the vote if the majority decides against them, because if they do so persistently then the essentially authoritarian power structure defined by the sysadmin->bureaucrat->sysop "chain of command" will sooner or later crack down on them. So instead of tyranny of the majority, we have tyranny of the sysops. :)

I have every desire to preserve existing incentives toward consensus-based collaboration; I think that goal is already substantially reflected in my proposal, and if deficiencies remain in that regard then I want to fix them. But as far as I can tell no one has actually read the proposal yet (somewhat understandable given its length).

Even supposing that voting is never appropriate on "main-line" working Wiki content, what about "stable" revisions or branches? Someone just pointed me to the slashdot interview you did a while ago (nice, BTW!) - particularly question 4, where you mentioned a "1.0 stable" release. In such a snapshot, presumably there will have to be _some_ way in which a "definitive" version of each Wikipedia page is to be selected, and I'm very curious to see how such a selection might be performed on controversial pages, without eventually devolving to something that amounts to a vote, whether formal or informal. There can only be a single "1.0 stable" version of a given page - _someone_ has to win, either the majority or the minority - and after that decision is made no one gets to go back and re-edit the 1.0 version of the page to suit their fancy. (At least I hope not!)

BTW, you mentioned in that interview a forthcoming draft proposal - has anything along these lines been released yet?

Thanks for your time, Bryan