On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Stephanie Daugherty <[email protected]> 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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
