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Re: Wikipedia decision making (was Re: [ox-en] Re: Business opportuities based on Free Software)



On Mon, May 29, 2006, Markus wrote about "Re: Wikipedia decision making (was Re: [ox-en] Re: Business opportuities based on Free Software)":
about the "sock puppets", one could also discuss that membership duration  
is an important criteria (in addition to the amount of edits).

This reminds me of a law in Israel, which granted certain tax benefits to
money kept in a saving account from which no money has been taken out in
15 years. The law was designed to encourage long-term saving, but what
actually happened was that people opened several such accounts (with a tiny
sum of money in each), so that in case they will need such an account
in the future, they will already have a "mature" (15 year old) account
ready for use.

So while taking membership duration into account will eliminate "obvious"
sock puppets (accounts created an hour ago just for use in today's vote)
it won't prevent deliberate attempts of "hoarding" identities (e.g., one
person consistently writing for many months under 10 different user names).

Of course, concensus voting also has its share of problems, with the biggest
problem is that nothing really important gets decided. No serious decision
can ever pass with a 100% vote: Even if there is one person against it,
he can always get other users - sockpuppets or real users - to help him
vote against. In fact, this is a common thing in Wikipedia - people who
feel strongly in some vote emailing all their wikipedian friends to come
vote in their favor. Since typical votes have about 20 voters out of a
million wikipedians, it's fairly trivial to swing every vote in any direction.

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