On 1 July 2013 20:47, Carl (CBM) <cbm.wikipe...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 6:38 AM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > tl;dr: voting creates winners and losers, and losers are unhappy and > > disengage. > > > This is exactly why Germany announced that their next presidential election > is going to eliminate voting entirely, and let the voters just argue about > it until they come to an agreement about the next president. If they can't > agree, the current president will be kept as the status quo. But at least > nobody will feel like their candidate lost. </sarcasm> >
In fairness the chapter does accept that democracy is okey for countries (because you can't leave them) although I would tend to disagree as to its reasoning as to why democracy was historically adopted. > The "voting is evil" idea has a kernel of truth: when a small number of > editors are working on an individual article, it is better to come to > mutual agreement on article content than to have lots of tiny polls about > the content. > The slogan is pretty useful in keeping things that way. > But somehow "voting is evil" spread to situations where consensus-based > decision making is well known to fail, e.g. on community-level issues where > hundreds of editors want to voice their input. Well, actually we do have a > sort of vote on those, but we claim it "really" isn't a vote, and then we > try to find someone with enough gravitas (a bureaucrat or arbitrator, in > extreme cases) to judge the "consensus". > > I would argue regardless of the wording used what is actually going on there is an attempt at an informed democracy which is probably the best we can hope for. -- geni _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
