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by southernplaces7
752 days ago
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>That's exactly what almost all knowledge is. That's what almost all human assumption and belief system is, also ideology and religion, but knowledge is indeed something different, and not of a type that should rely on democratic consensus. It instead needs to be held up by material evidence that's always subject to retesting no matter how unpopular a new idea is. This is obvious. The rest of what you say could just as easily be applied to the foolish social dogmas of nearly any past age in human history, dogmas that so often turned out to be wrong. A small number of reputable sources (for their time) upheld doctrines such as geocentrism, religious extremism, hatred for certain racial groups and numerous fervent beliefs in the right of certain people to dominate others. These are just a few examples. A more material one would be the certainty among reputable sources that plate tectonics were nonsense, until of course they were shown not to be by what started as an argument by only a few people who were deemed very unreliable. None of this is to give weight to every crackpot idea put forth, or claim that all opinions are equally valid until stated otherwise, but what makes the difference is evidence, not consensus. |
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Wikipedia doesn't establish consensus by pure numbers or voting, although it is a contributing factor. In disputes, it has moderated discussions with verdicts given by elevated users, including admins. Things like statistics and even (perhaps especially) precedent all weigh in. Popularity of a side can be weighted, but ruling purely based on popularity is actively discouraged.
This can lead to scenarios where 90% of users want something, but the moderater rules along with the 10%. Often, this happens when the discussion was initially among a bunch of relatively new users who aren't aware of some policy, and a more experienced editor points that a dispute is clearly not in line with some policy. This happens very regularly and is often a source of drama with long discussions.
This process actually arguably works better on popular and contentious pages; you get eyes and discussions of substance on those. Most boring pages are virtually ghost towns and are counterintuitively more susceptable to popularity-based consensus. Whatever you put up will likely stick, so it's just a matter of how many people and who will protect the page for the longest.
Also read this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie....
The second page addresses your concern about not giving too much weight to fringe theories. It's not enforced as well as it could be in many places though; it can be hard to judge what's due or undue weight.