Gov/en/Portal:Voting/Research: Difference between revisions

{{KidsIntro|Before choosing how to vote, it is smart to look at groups who have made decisions together online for a long time, like the people who build Wikipedia, the Debian computer system and the Firefox web browser. Scientists have also studied how these groups decide. This page tells what they learned. One big lesson: these groups vote only rarely, for the biggest questions. Most of the time they just do things, undo mistakes and talk.}}

{{ExpertIntro|One finding stated upfront: in all the communities studied here, formal voting is a last resort, reserved for complex or contested questions, while most decisions pass through lighter mechanisms (direct action, revert, discussion, lazy or rough consensus). Evidence base of the Voting portal, built on several reference bases rather than a single one. Wikimedia is one of them: it ran Schulze (Condorcet) Board elections on the SecurePoll secret-ballot extension in the late 2000s and early 2010s, then switched to single transferable vote (Meek, Droop quota) in 2021 for proportional multi-seat results; ArbCom elections and RfA complement consensus-based editorial decisions. Debian is another: it has elected its Project Leader with a Condorcet method (cloneproof Schwartz sequential dropping, equivalent to Schulze) under its constitution's Standard Resolution Procedure for over two decades, with published tallies, quorum and supermajority rules. Mozilla is a third, contrasting case: a well-documented module ownership system that distributes authority by contribution, without community-wide elections. Peer-reviewed research (Schulze 2011, Tideman 1987, Konieczny 2009, Forte et al. 2009, Shaw and Hill 2014, Jemielniak 2014, O'Mahony and Ferraro 2007, Leskovec et al. 2010, Mockus et al. 2002), plus Ostrom's commons research and community process documents (Wikipedia, Apache, IETF RFC 7282), documents the mathematical properties of these methods, the governance dynamics of these communities, and how these processes have been evaluated. Each cited source was verified online. The closing section lists what WikiDeal could take from this, as initial hypotheses.}}