geni wrote:
You don't "get consensus" in the way you "get a bunch of bananas from the store." You "get consensus" in the way you "get the joke."
Consensus isn't something you obtain, demand, husband, or cite. It's something that happens.
In fact it is something I cite and try to obtain. We work toward obtaining a cunsensus on article.
How can you cite something you don't have? You'd have to take a poll for every edit under a citable system of consensus. And Wikipedia would still have only two pages.
Consensus follows action. To believe otherwise is to obviate the prime directive of Wikipedia, which is to '''be bold'''.
The prime dirrective is to make an encyolpedia. in this case someone else was bold by revting the chage instantly.
Boldness is constructive. Reverts of good info are not. Continued reverts in the face of continued analysis of the good info are especially not. Owning a page and attempting to appoint oneself a steward of that page are egregiously not.
The cooperative counterparts in a community of bold people are those who accept the boldness of those who are right, regardless of the prior consensus.
Should I be bold and block you under the "don't dissagree with geni" rule and wait to see if a consensus forms or not?
Boldness applies to the construction of the encyclopedia, not the meta-activity that both secures and hinders that process.
Editors should be bold. Admins ought to fear for their careers should they make an error in judgment, as should all enforcers and adjudicators of the law.
This concept of cooperation imbues every organization that relies on the truth. Ask Galileo sometime. Or ask your 5th-grade science teacher why you were taught about Galileo's legal problems. (Not that I think I'm Galileo or these noobs are the Inquisition; but a boy's got to get out the ''reductio ad absurdum'' sometimes to put a point across.)
I fail to see the anology.
Galileo did not receive cooperation, though he told the truth. He lost his liberty not simply because it was true, but because he did not let the Church vet it and own its dissemination. Yet now the church accepts everything he said. The organization is the human race, its product is its sum of knowledge, and the Church failed to honor the truth until it was embarassed by its ego-driven insistence on bureaucracy.
Huh. Turns out the analogy is even more apt than when I first suggested it.
--Blair