On 3/3/06, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
I'd question this given Kim and Gmaxwell's numbers showing almost all articles on Wikipedia aren't contentious at all and consensus works fine. The pathological articles are the bits you hear about, not the majority.
I'm not talking about articles here. I'm talking about community and policy. Evidence is quite clear that consensus works on individual articles most of the time. However, evidence is also quite clear that consensus as a mechanism to craft broader policy for the encyclopedia and for the community does not work.
Adopting parliamentarianism as a guiding principle for the community does not mean that article editing would not continue to be governed by consensus. It's just that our unreasonable love of "consensus" as a governing principle has led us into an increasingly bad situation -- just as it did for the House of Lords oh so many decades ago.
Kelly