[WikiEN-l] Reflections on the end of the spoiler wars

[Joseph Reagle]

On Wednesday 14 November 2007, Philip Sandifer wrote:
> You're mostly just restating the basic paradox here. Yes - we want an  
> open discourse-based project. On the other hand, an extended six month  
> saga of forum shopping a doomed cause is not useful - it's counter- 
> productive, engenders bad faith and assumptions thereof, increases  
> wikistress, and sucks time and air away from the business of improving  
> articles.

In other governance systems, particularly consensus ones, there is often a 
notion of membership, or members in good standing, and a notion of 
precedent. This is important so that participation is not gamed -- like in 
the OOXML standardization games that have now wrecked the committee -- and 
discussion does not continually rehash touchy issues. Clearly, this is a 
difficult issue for an open content community like Wikipedia. However, in 
other consensus-oriented communities there is often a threshold that old 
issues will not be revisited unless there is a significant change in 
opinion or new information comes to light that would've significantly 
affected the earlier discussions. Is there no such norm in Wikipedia?