Polling and voting may not be ideal substitutes for general consensus, but they are far more efficient and representative than certain ways currently in place on our community when it comes to selecting editors to serve as administrators, bureaucrats, and when determining the course we should take in the future.
There are often complaints about administrative overreaching or inappropriate behavior that flouts the guidelines we as a community expect of our highly trusted delegates to these positions. An administrator is a person selected by fellow editors to perform highly important and occasionally sensitive maintenance tasks on the website. As such, the process of delegating editors to serve in this role can be rather tricky. Currently, administrators are appointed by bureaucrats, who take into consideration a quasi-election/discussion that hopes to establish consensus. However, a bureaucrat is not bound by the discussion; if the minority viewpoints are seen to be valid, the bureaucrat may support the editors falling into that category.
I believe that we must reform the administrative selection process to include a pure voting system, a smaller-scaled version of our Wikimedia Steward Elections that could take place in lieu of an RfA for a given candidate. This, I believe, would be a more efficient way of selecting these highly trusted delegates because an editor supported by a great deal of the community, despite valid opposition, is more representative and likely to be trusted by larger numbers of editors. Some will say that voters might not be of an appropriate caliber to choose administrators, and they might be inclined to say that editors who oppose RfA candidates because of their lack of experience in certain fields are correct in their views. Sometimes, the current system shoots down editors who could be outstanding administrators just because they haven't been active in certain battlegrounds of our website. On a website that devotes pages to information for "wannabe" administrators, it seems unnecessary to voice objections to candidacies because of the respective candidate's record in a particular area. Yes, an editor needs some experience to become an administrator, but I believe that editors voting in election-RfAs would be experienced enough themselves to select a qualified and worthy candidate. Let's not judge a high-quality vehicle by the tire-marks it makes.
Secondly, I think that polling when it comes to community decisions would be a good substitute for the often heated discussions that often arise about controversial issues and then get mired down in the muck of angry, misled vitriol. Take for example the once-never-abating proposals to rename our article on the Libyan Civil War. This led to high amounts of tension on that article's talk page, tension that is unhealthy in any encyclopedic community or in any community, for that matter. When it comes to debates like this, largely content-inspired, voting could show how the majority of community members feel on the subject, and then bureaucrats or trusted administrators thought of as representatives of the community could make a decision as to how this result compares with the depiction of the debated item in reputable sources.
Finally, voting would be a good substitute for some policy-making decisions. Policies should not be in place if a majority of editors involved in discussing the said policy do not agree on the status quo or the issue in question. A good argument should not be the basis for a policy, for a policy change, or for a proposal, no matter how our administrative and bureaucratic elements feel about those arguments. Instead, a majority of editors involved in discussing the topic should make the final call when it comes to determining policy on Wikipedia. Yes, this is an encyclopedia, and we don't want to get too far from our main goal, but no online effort like this can survive without an active and heard commmunity. We must rely on knowledgeable and diligent majorities, and not always eloquent minorities. dci | TALK