David Gerard wrote:
Consensus doesn't scale.
We've recently seen the numbers from Gmaxwell and Kim Bruning that show that this is not at all the case with articles - except a couple of hundred articles (out of 900k+) which appear to be pathological. *Mostly*, people leave articles to others who know about the area, and those who know about an area mostly manage to thrash out a consensus. The failures of consensus in article editing get a lot of attention but they are the *exception*.
The problem is that this exception takes up an exceptional amount of time that could be well spent on other endeavours. And occasionally, they degenerate into a really, really big mess that won't stop without intervention from someone in a position of authority (the autofellatio and Gdansk controversies I alluded to are the two examples I can think of off the top of my head).
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])