On 6/28/07, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote:
> On
6/27/07, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> The only workable concept of consensus I've ever discovered is
>> stability. If hundreds of people edit a piece of work in good faith
>> over a long period, what changes least over time may be presumed to be
>> there by consensus. However even the most apparently stable elements
>> of a work may be deposed quite easily. The result may be a new
>> consensus or, in other cases, a period of instability where the new
>> version and the old version compete.
This is easy to game. Just find a situation where dropping the work of the
hundreds of people is easy, but restoring it is orders of magnitude more
difficult. Drop their work and then claim a new "consensus" because it
isn't restored.
In my view of things, the stability of the new system provides it with
a competitive advantage. Short of applying some kind of compensatory
gearing, which I think would be unworkable, there is no way of
nullifying the advantage of simplicity.
There is a tension between this gradient towards simplification and
the natural tendency of thousands of individuals working roughly in
concert to produce byzantine complexity.