On Wednesday 14 November 2007, Philip Sandifer wrote:
You're mostly just restating the basic paradox here. Yes - we want an open discourse-based project. On the other hand, an extended six month saga of forum shopping a doomed cause is not useful - it's counter- productive, engenders bad faith and assumptions thereof, increases wikistress, and sucks time and air away from the business of improving articles.
In other governance systems, particularly consensus ones, there is often a notion of membership, or members in good standing, and a notion of precedent. This is important so that participation is not gamed -- like in the OOXML standardization games that have now wrecked the committee -- and discussion does not continually rehash touchy issues. Clearly, this is a difficult issue for an open content community like Wikipedia. However, in other consensus-oriented communities there is often a threshold that old issues will not be revisited unless there is a significant change in opinion or new information comes to light that would've significantly affected the earlier discussions. Is there no such norm in Wikipedia?