Jimmy Wales wrote in part:
Well, this logo contest is an experiment in voting. It has gone well in some ways, and not so well in other ways. In any case, no matter how we evaluate it overall, we can all agree that it has been educational, exposing some of the issues that we are going to have to deal with as we form scalable, stable, consensus-driven decision methods.
In many ways, the nature of Wikipedia makes scalability moot for most -- almost all -- of the decisions that we make. We make thousands of decisions every day on updating articles and these rarely even reach the stage where they are contentious. When they do, they are normally discussed on talk pages, and a consensus is, almost always, quietly reached there. Then there are a few occasions where some issue of debate spills out into the entire Wikipedia, or at least several pages, and that requires a wiki-wide (one language) discussion. Issues like the logo, which affect all Wikipedias, are extremely rare indeed! And this is as it should be, because it is for these issues that consensus doesn't scale well.
The current experiment is a good one because the choice of a logo from any of the fine leading contenders is not a life or death decision for the project. None of the choices available to us are bad, and so we can learn from this in a low-risk way.
I agree entirely. I called the process "farcical" in an earlier post, but that should not be interpreted as despair, or even criticism. Democracy is farcical by nature, but people can learn to do it better. (And it's no more farcical than a certain "real life" political election that I, as a registered California voter, will see in less than a month. Since Californians can also learn, the next recall will be handled better.)
Later, there will have to be some major policy decisions. In the past, these have always been made by consensus, which in reality boils down to us listening to all sides and encouraging different factions to accomodate each other so that we can find solutions that are better all around for everyone.
What major policy decisions will have to be made for all Wikipedias? Very few, I hope. That's the best solution to scalability problems.
-- Toby