On 6/29/07, Zoney zoney.ie@gmail.com wrote:
On 29/06/07, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/29/07, Zoney zoney.ie@gmail.com wrote:
My problem is that perpetuating the lie that decision-making on
Wikipedia is
by consensus, we don't strictly adhere to any other decision-making form
(
e.g. majority voting). In consequence, decisions are "whatever people
can
get away with".
I think that's a cynical way of putting it. Decisions are more likely closer to "whatever offends the least number of people". This is sometimes less than optimal--I could give my list of things I think are poor decisions and you could probably give yours. The result is that nobody is ecstatic but we have something we can move ahead with.
That's a less cynical and fairer way of putting it, and probably closer to the truth, but it still shouldn't be described as doing things by consensus.
I disagree. While it doesn't conform to the idea of people sitting down and working out a solution "on paper" in a deliberative fashion prior to executing it, I would say that the concept of deliberative consensus when applied to wikis is of limited use. My basic view of how wikis work can be condensed into "We all try to nail jelly to the wall and keep the stuff that sticks." All editors with a pragmatic, realistic view of how things work can accept that they won't always get a solution they're completely happy with.
People who aren't of a pragmatic view, and tend to have unrealistic expectations, will tend to recoil with horror from the realities of working on a wiki. It is probably from those people that our sternest critics are drawn.
Of course they have a point: the word we use, consensus, means something fundamentally different to us than it does to those people with their tidy, fair-minded, idealistic views. But we're too busy writing an encyclopedia to listen to them much, though we'll probably come back for a sanity check every now and then to see if their criticisms indicate that we could be pursuing our breakneck speed, slapped together, version of consensus in a more productive way (or failing that, a more entertaining one).