[WikiEN-l] Resolving conflicts and reaching consensus

[Martijn Hoekstra]

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 5:46 PM, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 4:38 AM, Peter Tesler <vptes1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone -
>> This is a project presented at Wikipedia Day 2010 at NYU in New York
>> last January..http://ideagra.ph
>> We presented this as a way to discuss a few of the most
>> complicated/controversial Wikimedia-related issues that haven't yet
>> garnered a consensus. It was specifically designed to fix the current
>> problems with Wikipedia's discuss pages (arguments get very long,
>> complex, and messy).
>>
>> What makes a debate here different from one on a standard discuss page?
>> Statements have a color (green/red) which represents their current
>> state of consensus (something that's been refuted, for instance, is
>> red). You can also re-use facts concluded in other debates by other
>> people - thus allowing the work of debating/reasoning to be
>> distributed among (potentially) billions of people.
>>
>> We've created a Wikipedia category for issues surrounding Wikipedia:
>> http://ideagra.ph/1870
>>
>> We need your feedback...
>>
>> -Peter
>>
>> Twitter: http://twitter.com/ideagraph
>> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Ideagraph/319390481771
>>
>>
>>
> The software looks pretty cool. Here are some of my concerns about it.
>
> A common way to stifle discussion about nuance in any situation is to refer
> to old discussions on similar ideas and say "we already discussed this and
> got consensus". Keeping an ancient history of all past debates could cause a
> single discussion to echo forward in time indefinitely. I don't think we
> should feel bound by previous arguments, and there is never a point where
> discussion cannot be re-opened.
>
> Also, keeping track of percentages in "voting" has a way of obscuring the
> actual arguments as not everyone's opinion is simply "up or down" on any
> issue. For example, this is why we don't simply count votes in an AFD (at
> least, we're not supposed to): We want to consider the weight of the
> arguments and get a more abstract 'feel' for what consensus is, rather than
> compiling a simple tally, because tallies aren't very informative.
>
> Finally, and most importantly, sometimes we need to go over topics again to
> address evolving editorial experience and new circumstances. It doesn't
> bother me if that means occasionally re-inventing the wheel, because every
> time we invent the wheel it might be a bit better or more well-suited to the
> situation than last time. It's good to archive past discussion for later
> reference (or to "catch up" new people who joined the conversation late),
> but not because we don't want people to have to think, use their reasoning,
> and engage in discussion on topics that someone else has discussed in the
> past; we want that because the process of discussion itself is
> enlightenment, even when the topic has been discussed in the past.
>
> - causa sui

For as far as I can see, this software actually tries to solve those
problems, by making it possible to comment on/refute old discussions,
while still weighing them, and it weighs opinions by the amount of
support it seems to have, opposed to simple vote counting.