On 2/7/06, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gawab.com> wrote:
Kirill Lokshin wrote:
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.
Not to mention that ludicrous conclusions on AfDs are often reached --
you won't believe how many times I've heard
"'''Keep''' all schools" or
"'''Keep''', this school exists". Surprisingly, these
people often "win".
That's because not everyone thinks that's a ludicrous conclusion.
Considering that even the smallest school affects hundreds, if not
thousands of people, and that schools in general have a remarkable
longevity, it's not that bizarre.