Proceedings talk:KM3

This is the discussion page for Kelly Martin's presentation at Wikimania 2006, Consensus as a governing principle: Does consensus scale?. Please join the discussion below!

• Note, the inclusion of the final two questions is a form of petitio principii: by asking those questions as quasi-absolutes you are forcing certain answers to the other questions. In addition, the use of "this" creates an ambiguity that will tend to focus answers on the, "Does the lack of an explicit social hierarchy lead to cabalism?" question.
  
• Define healthy. Healthy for Wiki? Healthy for its editors? Is there any other way to define consensus in Wiki as the poulation involved in any discussion shifts with the tides rather than retaining a stable base? By whom would the "selected leadership" be selected? If it were by the election of representatives, would such a representative democracy be healthy (whatever you choose that to mean) or would it conflict with certain core principles of the Wikipedia project? Is the suggestion of such a leadership group indicative of an acceptance of the hypotheses developed by political scientists that absolute forms of democracy are inherently anarchic? Is cabalism (by which I assume you mean the forming of "cliques") necessarily a "bad" thing -- is it not the way society itself functions? Is there any overwhelming reason to expect Wiki to be in someway removed from the modus operandi of the outside world? Is wiki's unstated aim to create a "virtual utopian society" as it would seem to be based on both its present guiding principles and the tenor of the questions you are asking? (If so, it is best to recall that utopia in Greek means "nowhere" or "no place".)
• As I will not be attending Wikimania I felt it best to raise these questions here so that you might ponder them in advance of the event, and perhaps alter the wording of your abstract. Jim62sch 09:27, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Some other questions...

What if the "consensual reality" is affected by the language community? For example, the consensus on what the term "China" means will change if your population is English speakers, people who write in simplified Chinese characters, people who write in traditional Chinese characters, people who write in Tibetan, or people who write in vernacular Taiwanese. In each of these groups the distribution of people with a given view of reality is very different, and you will end up with wildly different views of what the consensus is. What causes a lot of screaming is that a fringe view in one language community can be the dominant on in another.

Roadrunner 21:25, 27 July 2006 (UTC)