[Wikipedia-l] Vote on voting method for final round

[Jimmy Wales]

Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> I didn't read all post (translate is fastidious for me), but in
> those I read I see words as "silly", "pushy French attitude" and
> other not so friendly sentence. Hope it's just translation mistake
> ;o).

Well, I hope so, too.  I have not seen any such remarks, and I
personally thought you were Japanese.  :-)

> On the other hand, I didn't read any proposition to make vote
> process become more close to a consensus. For me, the vote method is
> not the real problem (average method & Condorcet are not so
> different in fact). Imho, the problem is a standard vote doesn't
> offer any dynamic solution.

Well, I share this concern, and indeed this is one of my main
objections to voting processes in general.  As you may or may not
know, I'm a longstanding skeptic of voting.

Here's the basic problem with voting -- voting is selection among
alternatives.  But often, rather than selecting from alternatives, we
are better off being creative at addressing the concerns of everyone,
of trying to combine options A and B to get C, which is preferred by
almost everyone.

HOWEVER, I also think that voting does have some benefits, and it does
at least scale well.  The problem with consensus is simply that
ultimately, it comes down to someone (me) saying what the consensus is
-- and if I'm unfair or don't listen thoughtfully to everyone, then
the entire process is a sham.

Of course I'm perfect in every way, ha ha, but still I can see how
people could be concerned about this.

> I'm aware that is only a personal point of view but I expected to
> ear some alternative solution instead of the eternal debate on the
> best way of count vote. But perhaps I just miss those discussions.

Maybe.  It's an important topic, and I think your point of view is
basically correct, i.e. we should be concerned about how a move
towards voting can give rise to dangerous divisions within the
community that wouldn't appear if we all continue in a commitment to
find solutions that are widely accepted.

> I agree consensus become harder as we get bigger. But instead of
> switch decision process to a standard vote method, we can perhaps
> just create some rules to make consensus easier to achieve.

I think that's a good idea.

And I also think that there need not be *one single* decision method
for every decision that needs to be made.

There are some decisions, like technical decisions, that need to be
made by technical people, period.  A popular vote by nonprogrammers on
whether to use ISAM tables or InnoDB tables would be silly.  A popular
vote on what kind of hardware to buy, or where to locate servers,
would be silly.  Those are primarily technical questions.

There are some decisions that don't even have to be made all at once
-- most editing decisions, for example, can stand to be left undecided
until experimentation shows us the way.

But sometimes there are decisions that are big, and that have to be
made in a timely fashion, and have to be made in a transparent manner
that takes into account as many views as possible, etc., and I think
voting can be useful for that.

> If I enter the debate it's just because I worried to see Oliezekat
> spend all his time to try to found alternative proposition (he
> really worked hard) and to be bother just because he didn't strictly
> respect the saintly rules.  Imho, the wikipedians must to be more
> flexible and patient; especially with those you have difficulty to
> speak/understand English. Next time, a non-American organizer!?

Sure, maybe next time we'll choose a European?  (This is a joke.  Erik
is not American, he's German.)

--Jimbo