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I participated in an academic survey of WP decision-making practices a while back. There were a bunch of questions about whether the usual RfC practices work well, and what I thought of alternatives including secret-ballot (direct democracy) ideas, among others. I have non-rigid opinions on this stuff, but have come to the following tentative conclusions:
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This page in a nutshell: These are some ruminations on a potential future replacement for our current RfC (and similar) vote-like systems, as Wikipedia transitions into the next phase of the organizational lifecycle. Most of this was first posted in a user-talk thread, but it actually works well as an essay. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 00:38, 15 December 2017 (UTC) |
Wikipedia's internal decision-making process has evolved quite markedly over time. All decisions were originally just open discussions (or, rarely, fiat declarations by Jimmy Wales), with a loose consensus emerging ... or failing to. By the late 2000s, potentially contentious decisions were conducted via explicit polls. RfCs also existed, but really were requests for comments, i.e. open discussions in which broader input was sought. Since the early 2010s, these merged, with RfCs becoming polls but (ideally) interpreted more like old-school consensus discussions.
Today, they are primarily just polls, despite denialism to the contrary. If we're going to proceed with a polling model (i.e. a vote even if we don't call it one) – and it looks like we are – then for long-term viability it should be done in a way that achieves all of the following: minimizes the early-commenter effect, cancels the mob-rule or "pure democracy" effect of always-visible votes (which induce pressure to vote with the majority even if the majority is clearly wrong), avoids the flaws inherent in winner-take-all voting systems (by us adapting one of the well-tested "distributed vote" systems, at least for anything with more than two options), and reduces the problem of the poster of the question/options often being able to shape the outcome by clever and biased wording. Accountability would have to be ensured by votes becoming public after poll closure, at least long enough for independent verification of the results (by anyone), e.g. to detect meatpuppetry.
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