[Wikipedia-l] Voting versus consensus

[Jimmy Wales]

Without drawing any conclusions for future decisionmaking, I'll just
point out that one of the negative side-effects of voting that has
been alleged is that voting encourages partisanship rather than
co-operation.

That is, if we are voting between A and B, then people who are in
favor of A have an incentive to speak badly of B, and people who are
in favor of B have an incentive to speak badly of A.  And both have an
incentive to publicly posture in favor of their own candidate,
minimizing the flaws and maximizing the benefits.

A consensus process, though, and I'm talking primarily here about the
wiki process for actually settling on good versions of articles,
encourages people to try to see the best in what the other side is
saying, and to try to incorporate that into their own version, and to
produce a new synthesis that has all the strengths of prior proposals
with none of the weaknesses.

It seems that in the current case, those potential incentive problems
of voting are on display.

Now, as I say, I'm not drawing any conclusions.  After all, I can't
think of how a wiki process could create a logo.  Perhaps the Gimp
(GNU free image creation program similar to the proprietary PhotoShop)
people could be encouraged to implement collaborative image editing
features, ha ha?  

So for decisions like this, voting might be the only way to go.

But, I think it *does* encourage bickering and partisanship, and I
think that's unfortunate.

--Jimbo