On 3/1/06, Peter Mackay peter.mackay@bigpond.com wrote:
Would we produce a great encyclopaedia if we all thought and worked the same way? I'm thinking that a certain degree of tension, conflict and competition helps us go beyond the banal. Some of the best features of Wikipedia are produced as a way of handling conflict. 3RR, for instance. It's silly, but it works.
We would definitely have more POV problems. Imagine a group of like-minded anti-abortionists sitting down to work, uninterrupted, on [[Abortion]]. You wouldn't have a single revert, edit war, personal attack, RfC or arbitration. But would the article end up with 73 references, and at least a passing resemblence of NPOV?
On the other hand, at a certain level, excessive conflict clearly does interfere with getting the job done. Just like how a workplace with no coffee breaks loses morale, a workplace with more coffee break time than work time is clearly even more inefficient.
Are we far from the happy medium?
Steve