[WikiEN-l] Re: Things that bother me

[Rob Lanphier]

Sheldon Rampton wrote:*
*

>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>/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.
>/
>No, but they suffer from other defects. In 1952, Kenneth Arrow, a 
>professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, proved this 
>using an "impossibility" theorem which showed that no voting system 
>is completely free from counterintuitive incomes.
>
I was going to change the subject line, but "Things that bother me" 
seems very appropriate. :-)

Arrow's theorem is often trotted out as an excuse to stick with the 
status quo. There's a couple things I should point out here:

1. A voting system doesn't have to be "perfect",
2.  Arrow's theorem comes under strain when dealing with Condorcet and 
similar systems.  In particular, the "Independence from Irrelevant 
Candidates (IIAC)" criteria is arguably too broad.  Arrow classifies 
candidates caught in a circular tie as "irrelevant".  It's the rarely 
used tiebreaker in Condorcet that fails, not the core method.  While 
still disqualifies it as "perfect", it does WAY better than 50%+1 (first 
past the post) does against Arrow's criteria.

A more complete rebuttal of Arrow can be found here:
http://electionmethods.org/Arrow.html

Having said all of that, the difference between these systems pretty 
much becomes moot when talking about yes/no decisions.  The examples 
I've seen on this thread seem to be of that nature.

>I think Wikipedia currently functions quite well, despite never 
>having bothered to develop a philosophy of governance. If we want to 
>find a word that describes how it actually operates, take a look at 
>the concept of "demarchy" coined by coined by Australian philosopher 
>John Burnheim. The only difference is that Burnheim imagined that 
>"policy juries" would be selected at random. With Wikipedia, the 
>"juries" that deliberate about each article are self-selected, not 
>random.
>
A more formal version of this would be good for many of the examples 
from this thread (deciding whether to ban a member, votes for deletion, 
votes for NPOV).  The tricky part is defining the jury pool, and 
figuring out when to sequester them.  :-)

Rob