Maybe free-range drafting?

[Michael Allan]

(clarification) It's not necessarily the WYSIWIG drafters who would do
the translation work.  Instead, it could just as easily be the
wikitext drafters.  The distribution of translating work in any given
poll would necessarily depend on how the votes shifted.  Ultimately,
it would be the voters who decided. *

                  (-)
            (*)    |
             |     |  (-)
         (*) |     |  /
           \ |     | /
            \|     |/
    (*)-----(T) + (T)-----(-)
                |
                |
                |    (*)
          (*)   |    /
            \   |   /
             \  |  /
              \ | /
               \|/
       (*)-----(R)
 

  (-)  Wikitext format
  (*)  WYSIWYG format


So imagine you're the root candidate (R).  You're drafting in WYSIWYG.
Your immediate voters must therefore draft in WYSIWYG, too.  Anyone
who wanted to draft in wikitext would first have to find a translator
(T).  T would maintain two drafts (one WYSIWYG and one wikitext) and
do the necessary translations to keep them in mutual sync.  (His
voters could help with this, of course.  Many of them would be
"bilingual", and potential rivals of T.)

Looked at in this way, isn't it a good solution?

I think we *must* have free-range drafting.  If we instead tried to
force everyone to use either WYSIWIG or wikitext, it would lead to a
split consensus along the lines of the various drafting formats/media.
It's much the same danger as Thomas foresaw with regard to voting
media: http://u.zelea.com/w/User:ThomasvonderElbe_GmxDe/Vote_mirroring

One party or the other would decamp in order to set up a new
pollwiki/pollserver site with their own preferred drafting
format/medium.  All the polls would then split in half between the two
sites, and they'd enage in an irrational competition for
drafters/voters (instead of a healthy competition for users).  Repeat
for all the various drafting media that anyone might strongly prefer.
(People who do lots of editing can be passionate about this.)  It
would all fall apart, and any hope of consensus on political issues
would be lost.

 * The positioning of translators in the tree could be a special case
   of the more general problem of positioning *experts*.  We can
   foresee that a large *tree might be a complex mosaic of specialized
   expert branches, all working more-or-less together in an *ad hoc*
   division of labour.

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/