[WikiEN-l] My proposal

[Jimmy Wales]

Axel Boldt wrote:
> That's interesting. The campaign for a voting procedure, repeatedly
> rejected by the mailing list, is now continued via private email
> directly to you? Could we have more details?

Erik has been emailing me with his reasons for thinking that
implementing a voting procedure for major decisions would be a good
idea.  We've had a good discussion about it, barring some side
discussions of real-world politics where I ended up going bonkers and
yelling at him.  :-)

One of the strongest arguments that he's made, in my opinion, is that
a voting procedure gives a clearcut _result_, whereas consensus is
necessarily vague.

One of the strongest arguments that I've made against voting is that
voting is usually game theoretically bad.  I can explain what I mean
by that if anyone is interested, but basically I think that we can
find better solutions under a consensus-seeking incentive system than
a power-bloc-seeking incentive system.

Erik counters this by suggesting a more sophisticated voting mechanism
like approval voting or Condorcet's Method or the like.  (Actually, he
didn't mention Condorcet, but it would be a good choice for us, I
think.)

Simple majority rule would almost certainly be a bad idea, as it would
tend to result in decisions that are clearly suboptimal.

--Jimbo