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*.

On 2/7/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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