[WikiEN-l] RE: Voting and/or Consensus

Wed Oct 29 12:03:55 UTC 2003

Message: 5
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 10:31:10 +0800
From: "Andrew Lih" <alih at hku.hk>

> On Behalf Of Brian Corr

> 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).

Yes, this is one of the things we're trying to pin
down with VfD policy
revisions: see [[Wikipedia:Deletion policy]] and
[[Wikipedia
talk:Deletion policy]] for exact details, but we are
going with 
majority
vote, and qualifying voters.

he ! you succeeded to push me to go and read the new
policy Andrew. That is the qualifying voters terms
that motivated me.

I read the new proposed policy, and this were my
feelings

* majority of 2/3 : this is a very low treshold.
Definitly not consensus any more. I was thinking of
all those cases where only three people give their
opinion,  two on one side, one against, and those
three being trusted users. And I was wondering if the
fact someone showed expertise or on the contrary never
showed any sign of being knowledgeable in a field
would make a difference. Say, if I create an very
specific article on an agriculture matter, perhaps one
I even work in, and two users that know nothing in
agriculture just say it gets only 100 hits on google,
so just delete it, it will just be deleted even though
these people know nothing of the matter ?

That sounds weird.

*100 major edits and one month old registration.
Whaou, that is huge. I reflected as well on the number
of french editors that stay only about a month, but
provide us 30 very good articles. I see not why they
would not have the right to speak their mind. I
understand quite well the need to avoid vandals
voting, but really, is not the 100 edits a bit high ?
Dunno, a user is allowed to give his opinion on a very
important communication matter such a logo, but is -
by definition, as long as he has not written enough -
not trusted to help cleaning the place ?

Also weird

>One reason why true consensus doesn't really work in
>Wikipedia is that
>voters are not stakeholders, as in your example of
>American Friends
>Service Committee (AFSC).  The ease of editing in
>Wikipedia means any
>passing joker can throw a pebble into the gears and
>jam the system.

That is not true. Everything can be reverted. Even
what a sysop do. A passing joker can not *jam* the
system

>So true consensus works only in a membership which is
>filtered in some 
>way, or voters are stakeholders in the result.

Probably true.
But then, on votes for deletion, there is now a
proposed procedure to filter the people who have the
right to speak up, still true consensus is not the
choice. 2/3 for filtered, trusted people is very low.

>So in the revised voting procedures for VfD, we try
to >filter or distinguish stakeholders from ballot
>stuffers -- valid voters must have existed for a
while >(days to weeks) and have made 100 article
edits.

yup, but no true consensus afterwards nonetheless

>This seems to be a reasonable enough of a requirement
>to make sure
>voters are stakeholders in Wikipedia's coherence. 
>This isn't the first
>time, the Logo vote (gasp!) also stipulated voters
>have at least 10
>edits to their name.

I disagree with 100 major edits being reasonable
requirement.

I hope that this does not progress with only filtered
people over 100 major edits having the right to vote
for NPOV :-)
Seriously

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