Gov/en/Portal:Voting/Research

💡 In simple words: Before choosing how to vote, it is smart to look at groups who have voted online for more than twenty years, like the people who build Wikipedia and the Debian computer system. Scientists have also studied their votes. This page tells what they learned.

🎯 In 20 seconds (expert summary): Evidence base of the voting cluster. Wikimedia ran Schulze (Condorcet) Board elections from 2008 to the 2010s on the SecurePoll secret-ballot extension, 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 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. Peer-reviewed research (Schulze 2011, Tideman 1987, Konieczny 2009, Forte et al. 2009, Shaw and Hill 2014, Jemielniak 2014) documents both the mathematical properties of these methods and the governance dynamics of wiki communities. Each cited source was verified online. The closing section lists what WikiDeal could take from this, as initial hypotheses.

Voting: research and experience

Status: draft. This page gathers verified facts and verified references. The conclusions drawn for WikiDeal are first hypotheses, to be validated by the steering committee and then by the community.

What twenty years of Wikimedia elections teach

The Wikimedia movement, which produces Wikipedia, has run large online elections since the mid-2000s and documents them publicly on Meta-Wiki.

• Condorcet in production. The 2008 Board of Trustees election used the Schulze method with 15 candidates, about 26,000 eligible voters and 3,019 valid ballots. The 2009 and 2011 Board elections used it again. Notably, the 2008 ballots contained a real Condorcet cycle among mid-ranked candidates, which the Schulze method resolved deterministically: the paradox is not just theoretical, and a well-chosen method handles it.
• Secret ballots at scale. These elections run on SecurePoll, a MediaWiki extension for encrypted secret ballots, administered by an election committee, and also used for the annual Arbitration Committee elections on the English Wikipedia. The 2013 election report notes operational issues with the tooling while confirming that none affected the security of votes: election infrastructure needs maintenance like any software.
• Methods can evolve. In 2021, Wikimedia switched its Board elections to the single transferable vote, using Meek's variant with the Droop quota in SecurePoll. The stated motivation family is proportionality: when several seats are filled at once, STV lets different parts of the community be represented. The lesson: a community can change its voting method as its needs change, if the method is a documented, revisable choice.
• Votes complement consensus, they do not replace it. Everyday editorial decisions on Wikipedia are taken by consensus, with structured discussions such as requests for comment and community processes such as requests for adminship in between pure discussion and pure voting. Formal elections are reserved for choosing people and settling major questions.

The Debian experience: Condorcet for over two decades

The Debian project, one of the oldest free software communities, elects its Project Leader every year and decides its general resolutions by vote, under the Standard Resolution Procedure of the Debian Constitution:

• The counting rule is a Condorcet method based on pairwise defeats and the Schwartz set, known as cloneproof Schwartz sequential dropping, equivalent to the Schulze method. It was written into the constitution by a 2003 constitutional amendment, and the project has used Condorcet-style counting since the early 2000s.
• Every ballot includes a built-in default option, so that voters can always prefer keeping the status quo; an option must beat the default by the required ratio to pass, and structural amendments require a 3:1 supermajority with a quorum.
• Tallies and full results of every vote are published on the Debian voting pages, so anyone can recompute an election.

Debian's record suggests that ranked Condorcet voting is practical, year after year, in a distributed volunteer community of moderate size, with fully verifiable results.

Academic research on wiki governance

Wikipedia's governance has been studied extensively by social scientists. Four verified peer-reviewed works are particularly relevant:

• Konieczny (2009) examined whether the iron law of oligarchy (the tendency of every organisation to end up run by a small elite) applies to Wikipedia, by tracing how a core policy evolved. He found many factors that prevent or slow oligarchy in wiki organisations, including low barriers to participation and the transparency of decision processes.
• Shaw and Hill (2014) tempered that optimism with a quantitative study of 683 wikis, finding that as peer production communities grow, early members tend to concentrate influence. Together, these two studies suggest that openness alone is not enough: explicit rules, elections and accountability mechanisms are needed to keep power circulating.
• Forte, Larco and Bruckman (2009) documented how Wikipedia governance became more decentralised as it scaled, with decision-making pushed toward smaller units, comparable in spirit to the proposed WikiDeal user groups and local arbitration chambers.
• Jemielniak (2014), an ethnography of Wikipedia written by an insider researcher, describes how procedures, elections and dispute resolution sustain trust among strangers who never meet.

Social choice research on multi-option decisions

Social choice theory provides the mathematical ground of the cluster:

• The Condorcet paradox (18th century) and Arrow's impossibility theorem (1951) establish that no ranked voting method can be perfect: collective preferences can cycle, and fairness criteria cannot all be satisfied at once.
• Tideman (1987) formalised independence of clones: a good method should not change its outcome when a near-duplicate option enters the race. This matters for WikiDeal open calls, where similar proposals are common.
• Schulze (2011), the founding paper of the Schulze method, proves that a single method can combine the Condorcet property, monotonicity, clone independence and reversal symmetry, and documents its adoption by free software communities.

The practical reading: since perfection is impossible, communities should pick methods whose documented properties match the decision at hand, which is the principle proposed on the cluster main page.

What WikiDeal could take from this (initial hypotheses)

• Simple majority is enough for binary questions; complex multi-option decisions deserve a Condorcet-style count (Schulze), and multi-seat elections a proportional method (STV): this mirrors twenty years of converging practice at Wikimedia and Debian.
• Secret ballots for electing people, public consensus for editorial work: two regimes, both proven at scale.
• An independent election committee, published tallies and recomputable results are what turn a vote into a trusted institution.
• The voting method itself should remain revisable by the community, as the Wikimedia 2021 switch shows.
• Openness alone does not prevent the concentration of power; regular elections and accountability mechanisms do the real work (Konieczny 2009; Shaw and Hill 2014).

References

All references verified online at the time of writing (title, authors, venue, year, working link):

• Schulze, Markus (2011). "A new monotonic, clone-independent, reversal symmetric, and condorcet-consistent single-winner election method". Social Choice and Welfare 36, pages 267 to 303. Springer.
• Tideman, T. Nicolaus (1987). "Independence of clones as a criterion for voting rules". Social Choice and Welfare 4, pages 185 to 206. Springer.
• Konieczny, Piotr (2009). "Governance, Organization, and Democracy on the Internet: The Iron Law and the Evolution of Wikipedia". Sociological Forum 24(1), pages 162 to 192. Open-access preprint (HAL).
• Forte, Andrea; Larco, Vanessa; Bruckman, Amy (2009). "Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance". Journal of Management Information Systems 26(1), pages 49 to 72. Bibliographic record (DBLP).
• Shaw, Aaron; Hill, Benjamin Mako (2014). "Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production". Journal of Communication 64(2), pages 215 to 238. Open-access version (arXiv).
• Jemielniak, Dariusz (2014). Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia. Stanford University Press. About the book.

See also: Voting at WikiDeal · Voting methods · Voting rules · Licensing and credits