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]])