Voting and/or Consensus (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Mother Teresa article)

Tue Oct 28 23:05:35 UTC 2003

Voting at Wikipedia  good, bad, neutral, necessary evil, unnecessary evil?
This came up yesterday, but I know it's not the first time.

I'm not proposing an answer -- but I do have some general thoughts on the 
matter. I'm involved in a number of nonprofit organizations and they 
operate in different manners -- and I use that experience as a basis for my 
thoughts on this. Here are 3 basic ways they work:

A) Seek Consensus, But Vote: For example, most of the organizations have a 
board of director that votes and uses majorities when necessary, but most 
hesitate to accept a vote if it is close, and they prefer to achieve 
something approaching consensus, but will accept a decision if there is a 
large majority (this seems similar to Wikipedia).

B) Simply Vote: A few organizations use pure majority rule -- but this is 
not very common in the organizations I'm involved in.

C) True Consensus: One organization I work with -- the American Friends 
Service Committee (AFSC) is based on Quaker beliefs even though many of the 
people involved are not Quakers  -- and there we work completely on 
consensus. Sometimes that means that it takes months or years to make a 
decision, but that is OK at AFSC.

I definitely believe as a matter of principle that consensus is the best 
way to operate, even if it can be slower. And I want to mention that with 
Quakers and at AFSC, people are completely committed to consensus -- and 
that means that people also know that it is a very big thing to block 
consensus. So for someone to block consensus, they must believe that it is 
extremely important -- for example, something that is opposed to the 
overall purpose of the organization (at AFSC) or to the spirit of the 
meeting (among Quakers  and "meeting" can be read as "congregation"). It is 
very unusual for someone to block consensus, because people realize that 
the process is as important as the decision in many ways -- both for the 
specific issue at hand and for the organization or the meeting in general. 
So it might not be too easy with so many Wikipedians who like to argue 
about *everything* ;-)

So I am still ruminating about what I think is the best way for Wikipedia 
to function, because it is difficult to pin down *only one way* -- or even 
two or three  that Wikipedia approaches decisions and conflicts, and 
therefore come to a conclusion about the best way to decide things. It 
seems that people prefer to have rules -- or at least to have guidelines -- 
to decide what is acceptable and unacceptable (I do as well). However, this 
is a positive feedback loop for those people (who will make more and more 
rules), and but will also drive away people with other focuses or 
personality types in a negative feedback loop (see 
<http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points/>). But as the 
project continues to increase in size and scope, and as more types of 
people join, it is not as clear what is the best way to proceed.

Primarily, I think that we need to think about the concept of voting and 
how it affects group processes. Wikipedia is an unusual hybrid of Wiki, 
NPOV, *and* altruistic self-interest (i.e., we all get some satisfaction 
from what we do here, but we also do it for the good of the 
project/community/world). I also think we need to look at how our 
decision-making processes affect how much we are open or closed -- we can 
be "open" to everybody, but if only one type of person can handle being a 
contributor or editor, what does that really mean for us.

Anyway, I have been reflecting a little bit about what I should focus my 
energy on -- and it seems like I should be writing articles and *not* 
checking Votes for deletion fifteen times each day. But I also feel that it 
is important to pay attention to the housekeeping work also, and that often 
takes me back to VfD and to Recent Changes. But I do think that we can 
bring something positive to articles and be NPOV -- but I find it hard to 
decide the balance between *contributing* and *housekeeping*.

And here's one more good link to check out: 
<http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiLifeCycle>. I think we might be 
somewhere near 17 (Wiki:DeclineOfCivility -- there are more strangers than 
friends, and AssumeGoodFaith fails as reputation is fleeting) and 18 
(arrival of the PoliceForces)

Anyway, that what I'm thinking today -- but tomorrow it may all change ;+)>

Brian

At 27 Oct 2003 17:50:32 -0800 (PST), Anthere wrote:
>Someone wrote me offline, to ask me what I thought of
>voting, because he noticed I rather rarely did, in
>particular very rarely on vfd. He pointed out that
>mail from Ec and TC to me.