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.