💡 In simple words: 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.

🎯 In 20 seconds (expert summary): 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.

Voting: research and experience

Status: draft (initial hypothesis), to be reviewed and validated before adoption. 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. No single community is treated as the model to copy: Wikimedia, Debian and Mozilla are used as reference bases among others, each with its own strengths and blind spots.

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. It is used here as one reference base among others: the exact election calendar matters less than the patterns it illustrates. The sourced numbers behind this section (ballots, methods, decision votes) are gathered on the dedicated history and results page.

Condorcet in production. Several Board of Trustees elections of the late 2000s and early 2010s used the Schulze method. The 2008 election, documented in detail, involved 15 candidates, about 26,000 eligible voters and 3,019 valid ballots; the 2009 and 2011 elections used the method again. These dates are given as documented examples, not as a complete history, and the point does not depend on them: what matters is that a Condorcet method worked repeatedly at that scale. The 2008 results page publishes the full pairwise comparison table and a dump of the ballots, so anyone can recompute the count. The page itself does not comment on cycles, but the published table shows a real preference circle among three mid-ranked candidates (Heiskanen preferred to Postlethwaite 841 to 770, Postlethwaite to Saintonge 797 to 769, Saintonge to Heiskanen 745 to 737): the Condorcet paradox is not just theoretical. It did not affect the outcome, since the winner beat every other candidate head to head, and completion rules such as Schulze exist precisely for such cases.
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.

The Mozilla experience: distributed authority without general elections

The Mozilla project, which produces the Firefox browser, is a third reference base, useful precisely because it made different choices. Its governance is publicly documented on mozilla.org and on the Mozilla wiki.

Authority follows contribution, not ballots. Mozilla describes itself as a virtual organization where authority is distributed to volunteer and employed members alike, based on their contributions. The core mechanism is module ownership: the project is split into modules (pieces of code or activities), each led by a module owner who approves changes, assisted by peers. Owners are appointed and can be removed through the module system itself, overseen by a dedicated Module Ownership module; they are not elected by the community at large.
A benevolent dictator at the top. Mozilla's roles page describes an ultimate decision-maker, a trusted community member with the final say in disputes, a role the page itself compares to the benevolent dictator model of many free software projects.
Two legal bodies. The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit, oversees the governance structure and wholly owns the Mozilla Corporation, which develops the software. The governance pages verified for this article do not describe any community-wide election mechanism for the Foundation's board.

Assessment (initial hypothesis). How participatory is it? Mozilla is participatory in a meritocratic sense: anyone can gain real authority over a module by contributing, discussions happen in a public governance forum, and escalation paths exist. But participation is not electoral: there is no equivalent of Wikimedia's community-elected Board seats or Debian's annual leader election, and the final word belongs to an appointed ultimate decision-maker. How documented is it? Well documented at the level of principles and roles (public policy pages, a public list of modules and owners, escalation rules), less documented than Wikimedia or Debian when it comes to decision records: there is no public equivalent of Debian's recomputable tallies, since there are no general votes to tally. For WikiDeal, Mozilla mainly shows that a community can be open and functional without general elections, and at what cost: legitimacy then rests on appointment chains rather than on votes, which is the opposite of the one user, one vote hypothesis explored in this portal.

Before the ballot: the documented ladder of lighter tools

Across these communities, voting sits at the top of a documented ladder of lighter decision tools, and most decisions never climb that high:

Wikipedia: bold, revert, discuss. The community documents an explicit escalation path. Editors are encouraged to make bold edits; if an edit is reverted, the next step is not a vote but a discussion with the person who reverted it. The consensus policy governs most decisions, a widely cited community page insists that polling is not a substitute for discussion, and the dispute resolution pages describe a graduated path (talk page, third opinions, structured processes) before any binding decision.
Apache: lazy consensus first. The Apache Software Foundation documents lazy consensus, described as the first and possibly the most important of its consensus-building tools: state an intent publicly, wait an appropriate time (usually 72 hours), and proceed if nobody objects. Its voting process page presents voting as the way to tell whether consensus has been reached when it is genuinely in question, with different rules for procedural issues, code changes and releases.
IETF: rough consensus, not majority rule. The Internet Engineering Task Force builds standards through rough consensus. RFC 7282 states explicitly that the IETF is supposed not to be run by a majority rule philosophy, and describes consensus as the practice of addressing objections rather than counting heads.
Commons research: graduated mechanisms. Elinor Ostrom's studies of long-enduring commons institutions, summarised in her design principles, found that durable communities use graduated sanctions and give members rapid access to low-cost local arenas for conflict resolution: cheap, light mechanisms handle most cases, and heavier procedures are reserved for what the light ones cannot settle.

The reading for WikiDeal (initial hypothesis): a Condorcet ballot is the heaviest tool in this ladder, not a supreme one. It is relevant where a case is complex and where the need to put it to a vote is clearly and widely perceived, and it works precisely because it is not asked to do everything. If a contribution can simply be reverted, no vote is needed; a vote becomes relevant only when a conflict survives revert and discussion.

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.

Evaluating these processes: what the research measures

Beyond describing governance, some peer-reviewed studies have explicitly evaluated how participatory, legitimate and well-documented these processes are. Three verified works complement the studies above:

O'Mahony and Ferraro (2007) followed the Debian community over several years and analysed how it built its governance system. Their evaluation: members created a shared basis of formal authority but deliberately limited it with democratic mechanisms (annual elections, a constitution, recallable leadership), and the community experimented with and revised its own rules over time. The study treats Debian's elections as a working system of legitimacy, not just a formality.
Leskovec, Huttenlocher and Kleinberg (2010) quantitatively evaluated a Wikipedia decision process: requests for adminship, where the community discusses and votes on promoting a member. Analysing large numbers of votes, they show that outcomes are strongly shaped by who votes, how early votes lean, and the relative status of voters and candidates. The evaluation lesson: even a public, well-documented voting process carries social dynamics that raw rules do not capture, so process design should be tested against real behaviour.
Mockus, Fielding and Herbsleb (2002) evaluated the development processes of Apache and Mozilla with quantitative data (code changes, problem reports, team sizes). For Mozilla, at that time, they document a process with commercial roots, more formal than Apache's, organised in modules with code ownership, and core groups creating most of the new functionality. It is an early, dated snapshot, but it shows that the degree of effective participation can be measured rather than assumed.

Two of the studies already cited above are themselves evaluations: Konieczny (2009) evaluates Wikipedia's resistance to oligarchy, and Shaw and Hill (2014) evaluate the concentration of power across 683 wikis. Taken together, the evaluation literature converges on one point: openness must be measured and maintained through explicit mechanisms, because it degrades silently otherwise.

Social choice research on multi-option decisions

Social choice theory provides the mathematical ground of this portal:

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 portal main page.

What WikiDeal could take from this (initial hypotheses)

Formal votes are rare events even in communities that vote well: a documented ladder of lighter tools (act, revert, discuss, lazy or rough consensus) settles most questions, and the ballot is reserved for what the ladder cannot settle (Wikipedia BRD, Apache lazy consensus, IETF RFC 7282, Ostrom's design principles).
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).
A community can function without general elections, as Mozilla shows, but legitimacy then rests on appointment chains; if WikiDeal wants one user, one vote to be real, it has to build the electoral institutions that Mozilla chose not to build.
The participatory quality of a process can and should be evaluated with data, not assumed (O'Mahony and Ferraro 2007; Leskovec et al. 2010; Mockus et al. 2002).

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.
O'Mahony, Siobhan; Ferraro, Fabrizio (2007). "The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community". Academy of Management Journal 50(5), pages 1079 to 1106. Author copy (PDF).
Leskovec, Jure; Huttenlocher, Daniel; Kleinberg, Jon (2010). "Governance in Social Media: A case study of the Wikipedia promotion process". Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). Open-access version (arXiv).
Mockus, Audris; Fielding, Roy T.; Herbsleb, James D. (2002). "Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla". ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 11(3), pages 309 to 346. Author copy (PDF).
Resnick, Pete (2014). "On Consensus and Humming in the IETF". RFC 7282, Internet Engineering Task Force. RFC Editor.
Ostrom, Elinor (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press. About the author and the design principles.
Mozilla governance documentation, verified online: Governance overview, Module ownership policy, Roles and leadership, Organizations, Module list.
Community decision-process documentation, verified online: Wikipedia bold, revert, discuss cycle, Wikipedia polling essay, Wikipedia dispute resolution, Apache lazy consensus, Apache voting process.