geni wrote:
On 3/7/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Obviously, the larger and more contentious the community, the bigger the challenge of consensus. But we cannot undertake such a debate without an open analysis of parliamentarianism's defects. Such a system encourages the forming of parties that will promote and protect particular policies, and who will be happy to have their POV succeed by a bare majority. It leads to the tyranny of the majority.
Parties generaly require a representive democracy. What we have is closer to the athian system.
Oh, I don't know; first there were the Inclusionists, Deletionists and Mergists; then there were the "joke parties" like the AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTD; then the ultra-conservative nuts like the Association of Moral Wikipedians, Wikipedians for Decency, and finally the Catholic Alliance of Wikipedia...
...and now, while the people who still take the ADW and AIW seriously are largely confined to AFD/DRV (where they've become anally retentive process fetishests), two new powers have emerged: the Pro- and Anti- Userboxes camps.
An interesting thing to note about all of the wrangling is that most of it has been about "What is Wikipedia"; the Inclusionsionist/Deletionist debate was largely about whether we should have articles on schools or not, and the Userbox debate seems to be about whether user pages are free webspace where you can promote your political agendas or not.