[WikiEN-l] Re: Things that bother me

Tue Jan 21 04:56:15 UTC 2003

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>One of the things that Eric pointed out to me is that thinking of
>voting as a simple "majority rules" (i.e. 50% plus 1) is too
>simplistic.  I _totally_ agree that 50% plus 1 would be a horrible
>rule, and likely to end up being a tool to close out minority voices.
>
>But there are other forms of voting (Condorcet's method, approval
>voting, etc.) that don't suffer from all the same defects.

No, but they suffer from other defects. In 1952, Kenneth Arrow, a 
professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, proved this 
using an "impossibility" theorem which showed that no voting system 
is completely free from counterintuitive incomes. Arrow looked at 
voting systems that satisfy two harmless- sounding properties. First, 
if everyone prefers candidate A to candidate B, then A should be 
ranked higher than B. Second, voters' opinions about candidate C 
shouldn't affect whether A beats B--after all, if you prefer coffee 
to tea, finding out that hot chocolate is available shouldn't 
suddenly make you prefer tea to coffee. These sound like reasonable 
restrictions, yet Arrow proved that the only voting system that 
always satisfies them is a dictatorship, where a single person's 
preferences determine the outcome. But this doesn't mean that a 
dictatorship produces an optimum result either, because dictatorship 
violates the democratic principle that government should be based on 
the consent of the governed. In short, perfect democracy is 
"impossible."

While there is no system that works perfectly, the *ideal* of 
democracy still has value and is something that can be approximated.

>I'm a big fan of the notion of a constitutional republic.  Majority
>rule is morally repugnant.  But some form of consensus voting, with
>the protection of a "constitution" or "bill of rights" for all
>wikipedians, rights that can't be taken away without some
>super-extraordinary voting procedure, will probably be the way to go,
>someday.

I disagree with the notion that majority rule is morally repugnant, 
but the concept of "democracy" doesn't really fit that well with 
Wikipedia anyway. If we were serious about "majority rule" for 
Wikipedia, we would need to have some system for ensuring the 
inclusion of a representative sample of the population being 
"represented," and that would mean, for starters, finding some way to 
include people who don't have access to the Internet (currently 90% 
of the world's population). Obviously, there aren't resources 
available to do this.

I think Wikipedia currently functions quite well, despite never 
having bothered to develop a philosophy of governance. If we want to 
find a word that describes how it actually operates, take a look at 
the concept of "demarchy" coined by coined by Australian philosopher 
John Burnheim. The only difference is that Burnheim imagined that 
"policy juries" would be selected at random. With Wikipedia, the 
"juries" that deliberate about each article are self-selected, not 
random.

If you want to read a little more about "demarchy," I added an entry 
on it to the Wikipedia. I was hoping I'd be able to make it the 
100,000th article, but I missed and landed on 100,005 instead. Oh 
well...it's still time for champagne, folks!
-- 
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
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