Jonathan Walther wrote:
I pick both. Benevolent dictatorship where the dictator listens to and respects the voice of his constituents works quite well. It amounts to concsensus; to retain power, the benevolent dictator has to come up with solutions that everyone can live with.
Well, yes and no. I'm the benevolent dictator here, and I think I do a good job of listening and trying to work to address a variety of concerns as best as possible. But I don't have to do this to retain power, really, except insofar as if I do a sufficient bad job, everyone will run away and refuse to play with me anymore.
There are a number of problems with our current model:
1. Determining when there is a consensus is difficult. On most issues, we end up with a solution that approaches unanimity -- this is the wiki way. But on some issues, it's sort of hard to say. People end up going along because they have a commitment to the overall *process* (i.e., they like me, and like the job I do generally, to a degree that they are willing to put up with some decisions that I make that they don't agree with).
2. Our current process doesn't scale well outside English. When a controversy breaks out in English and the noise gets loud enough, I can spend a few hours going through edit histories to try to determine what happened. This gives good people an incentive to be on their best behavior, because they want to make it easy for me when I have to judge someone.
But I can't do this in Swedish, so I have to listen to two sides of an argument where it sounds like both sides have behaved badly at times, and I can't figure out who started it, who is likely to continue it, and so on.
When you have votes on the other hand, the will of the majority can make things so unlikeable for minorities that they just up and leave.
One of the things that Eric pointed out to me is that thinking of voting as a simple "majority rules" (i.e. 50% plus 1) is too simplistic. I _totally_ agree that 50% plus 1 would be a horrible rule, and likely to end up being a tool to close out minority voices.
But there are other forms of voting (Condorcet's method, approval voting, etc.) that don't suffer from all the same defects.
Having said that, I still have grave reservations about using voting, reservations that derive from the incentives to "political" behavior that voting almost surely involves. Under our current system, all parties are forced to look for solutions that will be satisfactory to almost everyone, as opposed to merely looking for solutions with a large enough constituency to pass a voting threshold (and screw the rest of them!).
Did anyone ever notice that Kropotkin said Russian villages used to run entirely based on consensus, without any voting? Too bad the communists destroyed that lifestyle; I'd like to see firsthand how they managed it. I suspect it was because everyone shared a common culture, language, and religion, and had known each other all their lives.
And of course this is precisely what we don't have.
Having said all of this, I think that I would find very useful a way that I could formulate alternatives and have people formally register preferences, with the understanding that it's an experiment. A tool for more formally recognizing consensus. And then that tool might eventually (with experience and changes as necessary) be more formalized.
I'm a big fan of the notion of a constitutional republic. Majority rule is morally repugnant. But some form of consensus voting, with the protection of a "constitution" or "bill of rights" for all wikipedians, rights that can't be taken away without some super-extraordinary voting procedure, will probably be the way to go, someday.
--Jimbo