[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Leadership (was NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors} - repost

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Stephanie Daugherty
<sdaugherty at gmail.com> wrote:

> The only danger i see is some people
> will no longer be assured of the ability to derail consensus in favor
> of status quo.

The fact that consensus can change on Wikipedia is both its great
strength and its great weakness. It is possible, if the stars are
aligned right (i.e. the right people show up to the discussion), to
'change' a long-established consensus. Sometimes it emerges, through
later discussion and participation, that this so-called change in
consensus was illusory or false. Sometimes, it emerges that the
consensus had in fact changed, and the change to the status quo was
correct.

Finding this out, though, takes lots of time and discussion. This is
the weakness of the consensus-based system, in that you sometimes need
endless discussion merely to maintain the status quo. And also that
for some situations, consensus can swing from side to side, between
two or more different camps. Assessing the consensus requires looking
at both the short-term arguments and the long-term trends. Otherwise
you end up with a system where things chop-and-change constantly, and
no stability is achieved.

The classic example is naming debates, where a great deal of time and
energy goes into discussing what title an article should be at, and if
consensus was truly ruled on every few months, you might get a
situation where an article was at one name for a few months, and then
at another name for another few months. Clearly that sort of result
just drains time and resources away from where it should be focused,
and allows people to obsess over specific issues rather than looking
at the big picture.

This is why allowing the status quo to stay in the absence of
consensus otherwise is used. Anything else leads to increased
instability. Either that, or you insist on and enforce moratoriums on
repeating the same debates until a set period of time has passed.
Accept that the present discussion (whatever it is) has run its
course, and move on to work on other things, and then return to the
old discussion after that set period of time has passed. Over time,
you build up a long-term picture of how and whether consensus is
changing over month and years, or not, as the participants and
arguments change and evolve and mature.

Carcharoth