I think this is also the best way to understand the results of editing wars and the like.
A requirement for consensus is incompatible with individual rights, since people have the right to disagree. For low-interest topics, Wikipedia eventually succeeds anyway because less-motivated contributors become bored or exhausted and stop arguing. For high-interest topics, the search for consensus becomes more and more explicitly political - political as in "determining the governing rules of a body of disparate people", rather than political as in "are Republicans better than Democrats", although the two kinds of 'political' are both present in many edit wars.
Take the cool-off rules, for examples - locking an article for a period of time, or forbidding certain people from editing it. This is central to Wikipedia's functioning in highly controversial areas, but "nobody can edit this article today" is a policy, not a datapoint. Politics produces policy - a set of actions that can be acted upon by people who do NOT necessarily agree about the underlying facts.
Nasty edit-wars borrow from the tools of dictatorship and oppression - censorship, propaganda, exclusion from the body politic. It's not a coincidence; as mentioned above, consensus is incompatible with individual rights. You need to limit which individuals are allowed to participate, or negotiate the ways that their participation will be accepted. In a sufficiently small or like-minded group, consensus can work again.
A data server has a failure state where some of the data is lost. Wikipedia's failure state, on the other hand, resembles the internal rupture of a political party in a post-Soviet state. Like communist countries, Wikipedia articles demand consensus from their citizens in order to operate.
Of course, unlike Eastern Bloc revolutions, Wikipedia contributors typically do not get lined up against a wall and shot. =) That's also one of the reasons we tend to put Wikipedia edit wars in either the "tech company struggles with its architecture" bucket or the "people on the Internet are angry, news at 7" bucket, rather than the "fractured political unit experiences internal strife due to irreconcilable demands on limited resources" bucket where they actually belong.
Do you have any ideas for other rules that can increase the useful-output-to-political-conflict ratio?
(Welcome either in this thread or in direct communication; I am trying to devise better computer-mediated systems for this. While conflict and politics are intrinsic to human affairs I think proper system design can reduce the number of zero- or negative-sum interactions.)
A requirement for consensus is incompatible with individual rights, since people have the right to disagree. For low-interest topics, Wikipedia eventually succeeds anyway because less-motivated contributors become bored or exhausted and stop arguing. For high-interest topics, the search for consensus becomes more and more explicitly political - political as in "determining the governing rules of a body of disparate people", rather than political as in "are Republicans better than Democrats", although the two kinds of 'political' are both present in many edit wars.
Take the cool-off rules, for examples - locking an article for a period of time, or forbidding certain people from editing it. This is central to Wikipedia's functioning in highly controversial areas, but "nobody can edit this article today" is a policy, not a datapoint. Politics produces policy - a set of actions that can be acted upon by people who do NOT necessarily agree about the underlying facts.
Nasty edit-wars borrow from the tools of dictatorship and oppression - censorship, propaganda, exclusion from the body politic. It's not a coincidence; as mentioned above, consensus is incompatible with individual rights. You need to limit which individuals are allowed to participate, or negotiate the ways that their participation will be accepted. In a sufficiently small or like-minded group, consensus can work again.
A data server has a failure state where some of the data is lost. Wikipedia's failure state, on the other hand, resembles the internal rupture of a political party in a post-Soviet state. Like communist countries, Wikipedia articles demand consensus from their citizens in order to operate.
Of course, unlike Eastern Bloc revolutions, Wikipedia contributors typically do not get lined up against a wall and shot. =) That's also one of the reasons we tend to put Wikipedia edit wars in either the "tech company struggles with its architecture" bucket or the "people on the Internet are angry, news at 7" bucket, rather than the "fractured political unit experiences internal strife due to irreconcilable demands on limited resources" bucket where they actually belong.