On Oct 26, 2005, at 7:31 PM, geni wrote:
I try to be a realist. The current size of the project means that we
know have people or even groups of people who will never agree on
anything ever. The time needed to carry out the length of debate
needed to get anything close to consensus is now so long that if we
want a result withing a decade we have to use supermajority rather
than consensus. No amout of jumping up and down saying wikipedia is
not a democracy is going to change that.
And no amount of cataloging the difficulties of consensus-building is
going to make Wikipedia a democracy.
I'm delivering a paper tomorrow (One that I'll probably also submit
to Wikimania) on a related issue here, though, and I don't think it's
number of people that determines whether an issue can be settled or
not. I think it's that we have a very, very concrete epistemology for
article content. What I mean is that NPOV, verifiability, NOR, and
the like make it so anyone, expert or no, can evaluate an article's
quality. Consensus works because we're all working from the same page.
The epistemology for deletion debates is far from set, though. And
the epistemology for policy decisions at large are totally unset. We
have a few Foundation issues, but for the most part, there's room for
totally different interpretations of what the project is. And as long
as that's true, there's no way we're going to reliably obtain
agreement of any sort.
Which is mostly a plea for the Foundation to "lay the smack down" as
it were.
-Snowspinner