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.
- d.