[WikiEN-l] "Consensus"and decision making on Wikipedia

[Tony Sidaway]

On 6/28/07, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> > > On 6/27/07, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> The only workable concept of consensus I've ever discovered is
> > >> stability.  If hundreds of people edit a piece of work in good faith
> > >> over a long period, what changes least over time may be presumed to be
> > >> there by consensus.  However even the most apparently stable elements
> > >> of a work may be deposed quite easily.  The result may be a new
> > >> consensus or, in other cases, a period of instability where the new
> > >> version and the old version compete.
>
> This is easy to game.  Just find a situation where dropping the work of the
> hundreds of people is easy, but restoring it is orders of magnitude more
> difficult.  Drop their work and then claim a new "consensus" because it
> isn't restored.

In my view of things, the stability of the new system provides it with
a competitive advantage.  Short of applying some kind of compensatory
gearing, which I think would be unworkable, there is no way of
nullifying the advantage of simplicity.

There is a tension between this gradient towards simplification and
the natural tendency of thousands of individuals working roughly in
concert to produce byzantine complexity.