Yes the pedia is somewhat ossified and change in many areas is difficult to achieve. You only have to look at the various attempts to reform RFA to see that.
Of course there are many possible changes that fail because they only have minority support, and while it might be frustrating for the minority who advocate such schemes, it is much easier to accept losing an argument when you are clearly in a minority. Where the process becomes more problematic is when you have a blocking minority preventing change. To my mind consensus based decision making requires a high proportion of participants to be willing to consider other people's viewpoints and seek a consensus solution. Where this becomes frustrating is when you have dogmatic minorities who don't need to consider compromise because they have sufficient numbers to block any change. Where consensus becomes pernicious is when a minority can achieve change against the will of the majority, we see that in the ratcheting of standards at RFA; Once we have over 30% of RFA !voters who want an additional hurdle to adminship then that change has happened, and the de facto bar for adminship has risen a further notch. Most of our current admins went through RFA in an era where 3,000 manual edits and 12 months tenure were far more than one needed to be taken as a serious candidate. If you ran today with only 12 months tenure you might get through, but you risk being told that you are not yet really part of our community. By process of candidates failing to get consensus for promotion the de facto standards at RFA ratchet upwards. That standards inflation has not come about because of a series of consensus or even majority based decisions to change the criteria at RFA, it has come about because minorities emerge who are willing to oppose candidates who don't meet certain thresholds of tenure and editcountitis. WereSpielChequers _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
