On 2/7/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> 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*.
With policy, this hinders change greatly, but
it's unlikely to be a
major problem in the near future. With wheel warring or serious edit
wars, however, the fact that consensus doesn't scale is wasting a lot of
our time here. It takes being hauled in front of the arbcom to get any
results.
Yeah. It's getting policy consensus to scale that's tricky. Continuous
reference to basic principles - "we're here to write an encyclopedia",
"NPOV", "don't be a dick", etc - may be a useful touchstone for
either
deriving a lot of the crufted policy from first principles or getting
rid of it.
Those numbers really don't show as much as one might think, though.
OF COURSE any individial article will, on average, have only a handful
of editors. The problem is that Wikipedia is increasingly becoming
large enough to make reinventing the wheel on every individual article
untenable. Thus, we get attempts to create policy/guidelines/style
guides/whatever centrally and apply them to a (large) group of
articles at the same time, which means consensus needs to form not
among a few editors of an article, but among all active editors in a
field.
This is most obvious in AFD, incidentally; attempts to delete all
schools/Pokemon/roads/etc. get a lot more people involved than have
edited any single one of the articles in question.
Kirill Lokshin