[Wikipedia-l] voting on www.wikipedia.org

[The Cunctator]

On 10/26/02 9:11 AM, "elian" <elian at gmx.li> wrote:
> Mmost arguments in favor or against different
> solutions seem to have been presented now, but I must say I lost track who
> wants
> what. Furthermore it's a useless waste of energy to work on different
> solutions without knowing which is wanted.

It's never a total waste. But it certainly does make sense to expend effort
in the best direction.

Some important considerations that have been lacking in the proposals for
new designs:
1) scalability
--How does the design handle adding new languages? What if the number of
languages is 30? 100? Is the design still fine? Or is the rule that only the
top n languages are listed on the front, and the others are at "Other
languages"? If that is the case, then isn't that essentially the same
problem as the current situation (language minorities not getting identical
representation as the majority)?
2) neutrality
--The ordering of entries is not neutral. Should it be randomly rearranged
every time someone comes to the front page? Should it be by size?
 
> So I invite people to give their vote..
> 
Unfortunately, voting is not really a good way of running things. See
Meatball:VotingIsEvil.

http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?VotingIsEvil
and
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~puremath/theorems/gibbard.html