geni wrote:
On 3/7/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)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.
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