On Jun 29, 2006, at 10:20 AM, Jon Awbrey wrote:
of what is here nomenclated as "De Facto Consensus" (DFC). DFC must not be confused with Genuine Consensus -- defined as the absence of dissent -- DFC as it's currently observed in WP means that any three users, or evatars, coming to agreement in a half hour period, can impose their absolute dictatorship over the direction of an article.
Ah! This is more specific. And I don't even particularly dispute your claim that a preference for DFC exists, or even that such a preference is a problem, although I do think you exaggerate the degree of the problem.
The questions are - what is an alternative to DFC , why is DFC preferred, and what can we do about that preference? (either within Wikipedia, or in a fork of Wikipedia). I will attempt to answer the first question below, and leave the others to later.
What is an alternative to DFC?
"Genuine Consensus" is not possible; since the editing pool for Wikipedia is theoretically unlimited, we can never be sure that everyone who could edit an article does not disagree. However, we could require that any changes to an article be proposed before being done and make sure that anyone who states a disagreement with the proposed changes within a given period (anywhere from a half hour to one month) changes their mind or the changes cannot be made. A disadvantage of this is that any article which a crackpot decided to take an interest in would be impossible to change until the crackpot decided to leave. This proposal would strongly change the wiki quality of Wikipedia, so it probably would be necessary to attempt this in a fork.
It would also be possible to require that any changes to an article which were objected to, by anyone, at any time, even long after they were first entered, would be able to be removed, and could only be re-entered if that person removed their objections. A disadvantage of this is that material could be removed, and be unable to be re-entered, by someone objecting and then refusing to communicate further. This could lead to massive sections of the 'pedia being permanently removed. This also would have to be attempted in a fork.
Another possibility is to require a larger, but specific, number of user accounts (with all the sockpuppeting issues that entails) to determine the inclusion or removal of a given section of text.
I would be very curious to hear Mr. Awbrey's preference for an alternative, either one of the ones above, or another one I have not mentioned.
Jesse Weinstein