2007/7/15, Berto 'd Sera albertoserra@ukr.net:
In your case I'd say people seem more interested in ending a war than in having a majority POV expressed as such. Probably the best thing to do in such cases is to define an external authority (as an independent source of information) that can be trusted as "mainstream" on the subject. I have to warn you that no such choice is going to be perceived as "perfect" (cfr. ISO and languages), yet at least you won't have a few local wikimedians "playing God" over the others.
I have tried. I was asked to solve the issue, and to do so read in the university library what books I could find about the subject (I'm talking about Saint Boniface in this case, by the way). The reaction to this by the one that I disagreed with, was "That Engels is of the opinion that Wikipedia is meant to propagate the existing historical knowledge and not to extend or correct it, is a very sad thing." If 'the great majority of historians' is not accepted as an authority, I don't think anything else will.
There cannot be an immediate list of all such possible external references, because the field is too wide. Possibly you might want to ask your ArbCom to analyze such edit wars and to define such a source for a given subject when needed.
This will be hard - if I put this for the Dutch ArbCom, the probable reaction will be "the issue is about the content of Wikipedia. Decisions about the content of Wikipedia are not within our jurisdiction, so we will not take the case."