[WikiEN-l] New Ideas for AfD

[Philip Sandifer]

On Oct 26, 2005, at 7:31 PM, geni wrote:
>
> I try to be a realist. The current size of the project means that we
> know have people or even groups of people who will never agree on
> anything ever. The time needed to carry out the length of debate
> needed to get anything close to consensus is now so long that if we
> want a result withing a decade we have to use supermajority rather
> than consensus. No amout of jumping up and down saying wikipedia is
> not a democracy is going to change that.
>

And no amount of cataloging the difficulties of consensus-building is  
going to make Wikipedia a democracy.

I'm delivering a paper tomorrow (One that I'll probably also submit  
to Wikimania) on a related issue here, though, and I don't think it's  
number of people that determines whether an issue can be settled or  
not. I think it's that we have a very, very concrete epistemology for  
article content. What I mean is that NPOV, verifiability, NOR, and  
the like make it so anyone, expert or no, can evaluate an article's  
quality. Consensus works because we're all working from the same page.

The epistemology for deletion debates is far from set, though. And  
the epistemology for policy decisions at large are totally unset. We  
have a few Foundation issues, but for the most part, there's room for  
totally different interpretations of what the project is. And as long  
as that's true, there's no way we're going to reliably obtain  
agreement of any sort.

Which is mostly a plea for the Foundation to "lay the smack down" as  
it were.

-Snowspinner