Forum:Amending BF:VOTE

I have two suggestions for BF:VOTE.

Prelude
The reason these have come up is because we're a relatively small, homogenous wiki. When one user agrees with something, typically most of the others will agree as well. This may or may not be logical in some given circumstances -- forums on banning a given user might be biased if a large number of users simply dislike the user in question. The same might go for a given petition -- if somebody not many people like suggests some policy or change, they might be shot down just based on the fact that nobody likes them.

This is called the mob rule effect. In the words of Ben Franklin, "Democracy is a lamb and two wolves deciding what to have for dinner." So, I have some suggestions which might help limit this effect in the future.

Supermajority vote
I've been thinking about something for a while. Could we perhaps amend BF:VOTE and state that it would require a 75% majority vote in order to pass anything?

You might be wondering why I'm proposing this. Well, think about the way simple-majority votes (majority wins) work -- in contentious cases, you're potentially alienating a sizeable portion of the wiki. In the worst cases, you could even be alienating the majority -- if there are four suggestions up for vote, and one has a 26% lead, the remaining 74% of the wiki would probably be pissed. Normally, you'll find the community in enough of an agreement that this would not be necessary, but this would solve two problems: it solves the problem of tiebreakers (by default there would be no need to have tiebreakers to start with) and two, it would reduce the "mob rule" effect. We can ensure that a majority of the wiki really wants any given thing passed.

This doesn't necessarily have to apply to everything. Small things could be solved by normal simple majority. But major things, such as policy-changes, should probably have a limitation like this.

Administrative oversight
Basically what this amendment would say is that in cases of contention, if all of the admins are in agreement that something should, or should not, be passed, then their decision would go through regardless of the vote.

Again, this is largely a response to the mob rule effect, for the same reasons as instituting supermajority vote.

Discussion
Thoughts? Юра 04:34, August 11, 2013 (UTC)