[WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

Fri Jun 30 02:26:53 UTC 2006

On Jun 29, 2006, at 10:20 AM, Jon Awbrey wrote:
> of what is here nomenclated as "De Facto Consensus" (DFC).  DFC must 
> not be confused
> with Genuine Consensus -- defined as the absence of dissent -- DFC as 
> it's currently
> observed in WP means that any three users, or evatars, coming to 
> agreement in a half
> hour period, can impose their absolute dictatorship over the direction 
> of an article.
Ah!  This is more specific.  And I don't even particularly dispute your 
claim that a preference for DFC exists, or even that such a preference 
is a problem, although I do think you exaggerate the degree of the 
problem.

The questions are - what is an alternative to DFC , why is DFC 
preferred, and what can we do about that preference? (either within 
Wikipedia, or in a fork of Wikipedia).  I will attempt to answer the 
first question below, and leave the others to later.

What is an alternative to DFC?

"Genuine Consensus" is not possible; since the editing pool for 
Wikipedia is theoretically unlimited, we can never be sure that 
everyone who could edit an article does not disagree.  However, we 
could require that any changes to an article be proposed before being 
done and make sure that anyone who states a disagreement with the 
proposed changes within a given period (anywhere from a half hour to 
one month) changes their mind or the changes cannot be made.  A 
disadvantage of this is that any article which a crackpot decided to 
take an interest in would be impossible to change until the crackpot 
decided to leave.  This proposal would strongly change the wiki quality 
of Wikipedia, so it probably would be necessary to attempt this in a 
fork.

It would also be possible to require that any changes to an article 
which were objected to, by anyone, at any time, even long after they 
were first entered, would be able to be removed, and could only be 
re-entered if that person removed their objections.  A disadvantage of 
this is that material could be removed, and be unable to be re-entered, 
by someone objecting and then refusing to communicate further.  This 
could lead to massive sections of the 'pedia being permanently removed. 
  This also would have to be attempted in a fork.

Another possibility is to require a larger, but specific, number of 
user accounts (with all the sockpuppeting issues that entails) to 
determine the inclusion or removal of a given section of text.

I would be very curious to hear Mr. Awbrey's preference for an 
alternative, either one of the ones above, or another one I have not 
mentioned.

Jesse Weinstein