Wikipedia talk:Voting is not evil

Some problems

This essay has some strong points, but it also has one or two real doozies that I feel the need to point out.

• Each user gets one vote, and when the voting closes (either by a consensus or predetermined time limit) the side with majority votes is the winner.

  This is by no means the only way or even the best way for a "vote" to be evaluated. We often use polls (sometimes a better word than vote) as purely information gathering tools, and I hope that most if not all "votes" here have some aspects of an information gathering poll about them. Actually setting up a "majority rules" vote is pretty much a terrible idea, because it creates the conditions where someone can get their way with force of numbers, and that is never how we decide what the encyclopedia should say.

• A classic example of this is WP:AfD, where articles are appraised for deletion. There are two choices: keep (either as an article, or in a merger into some larger topic) or delete.

  AfD is absolutely never a vote. Don't encourage the idea that AfD is a vote; it just upsets people when we have to close them against the numbers, which is perfectly within policy.

• There are people above, and there are people below.

  Again, this is a terrible way to encourage people to think of Wikipedia. Admins are supposed to be janitors, not "those above". Don't encourage admins to think of themselves as authority figures; we already have a tendency to do that, and this tendency is to be fought, not reinforced. We are skilled servants; don't call us boss.

• votes are semi-permanent.

  No. Decisions are not binding at Wikipedia, period. If a group of people decide to have a vote, come to a majority, and claim they've got something permanent, those people need a reality check, not an essay supporting their delusion. The vote is always biased towards the crowd that happened to show up that particular week, and therefore is utterly unreliable as an indicator that a different crowd, or the Wikipedia community as a whole, would come to the same decision. Don't encourage the idea that holding a vote and coming out the other side endows subsequent actions with any kind of magic authority.

There's also some quite good material in this essay, but the above four points are egregious, in my opinion. This essay does not currently reflect Wikipedia voting culture, and seems to encourage some damaging misconceptions. -GTBacchus^(talk) 16:47, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Good edits to the essay by Litefantastic eliminated two and three above. I must say I agree with you on the first point as well, although I'm not quite sure how to work it into the essay text. (I may give it a shot later.)

I do, however, agree with the statement that "votes are semi-permanent". "Permanent" (much less semi-permanent) does not mean the same thing as "binding". I think the point the essayist was trying to make is that voting results are more likely to be referred to in future disputes and be falsely interpreted as more official. In other words, if a dispute occurs and is resolved by a vote, and later a similar dispute occurs, the second dispute is likely to be attempted be resolved simply by saying something like "No, we already rejected that with a 7-1 vote." However, if the first dispute were resolved by consensus building discussion, the discussion could be referred back to, and if need be repeated, which is more informative to the user who raised the second dispute.

To be clear though, just because I agree with the statement "votes are semi-permanent" doesn't mean I agree with the statement "votes should be permanent.

Perhaps a better title for this essay would be "Voting is not necessarily evil", as it does need to be done carefully. -- Northenglish 01:11, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Shortcuts

Not sure why anyone wants to send a the WP:VOTE redirect to WP:VIE when WP:NOVOTE (a much more logical shortcut imho) already does. VOTE=yes do vote! which is the theme of this essay. Obviously NOVOTE=no do not vote which is the theme of Wikipedia:Voting is evil. (→Netscott) 00:32, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually, read the essay. It does not say "yes, do vote". And no one uses this redirect to refer to this page. —Centrx→talk • 01:16, 14 September 2006 (UTC)