[WikiEN-l] Resolving conflicts and reaching consensus

[Peter Tesler]

> I think that the major problem with the software is that it assumes
> that things are true/false. In the real world shades of gray are much
> more common.

Well, actually, green means that "consensus exists that the statement
is true" and red means that "no consensus exists that the statement is
true or false", i.e. red does not mean false. I think the software
takes care of the "grayness" issue very well - you have to craft your
statements in such a way that they properly illustrate the "gray
areas" of the real world - otherwise, they get refuted and turn red.

> There seems to be no way to have things that oppose
> something and other things that boost it.

Refute is really all you need. To oppose, you refute. To support, you
do nothing - or, you refute other statements that contradict the
statement you want to support. So, if someone refutes statement X with
"Why?", you can refute "Why?" with an explanation that supports X.

> I'm also very unconvinced by the percentages, they seem to be
> pseudo-information rather than anything meaningful. Possibly using
> averages of values assigned by people might be a better approach or
> something.

You're correct about that - any kind of score, percentage, etc.
suffers from the same problem - they average the opinions of many
people, each having only a subset of all the facts (something that
averaging "values assigned by people" isn't immune from).

And since the project is rather young, the percentages don't really
mean much yet. But if you have a million people working away on a
statement, the percentages will start to offer a more useful insight
into the lean of the population. Tell me if you think the percentages
should be hidden for now.

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