Wikipedia talk:You don't have to win by arguing

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Excellent

This is one of the finest wiki-sociology essays I have ever read. It is very important that editors need to remember that Wikipedia is not important. However, I must dispute your ideal gas law analogy. Adding more editors to the talk page would increase n while V stays the same. Per chemical kinetics, this increases P, and P α T. Therefore, the discussion should not cool down. Unless, of course, the participants are at a significantly cooler temperature. (There is also the matter of how quickly they will effuse from a pinhole). —harej (talk) (cool!) 06:09, 8 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough. That's assuming, though, that participants are molecules, and not volume elements. Perhaps the points being disputed are the energetic particles, and adding editors to the conversation allows those points to move about inside more heads?

Eh... the analogy needs work. I'm glad you like the essay, besides that. :) -GTBacchus^(talk) 19:28, 3 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Disagree

What you've described is the theory. In practice, my experience, both trying to follow this process & responding to RfCs myself, is that it doesn't work that way. Hardly anyone shows up, let alone stays around to try to enforce content policy. The community will neither enforce it nor authorize anyone else to do so. Editors are left to haggle it out among themselves. Assuming they're all equally committed & equally skilled at haggling, the expected result should be something like this:

policy say different POVs should be represented roughly in proportion to their prominence in reliable sources
the actual working of Wikipedia's procedures, as outlined above, should result in POVs' being represented roughly in proportion to their prominence among the editors of the article.

Peter jackson (talk) 10:41, 8 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with your objection, to an extent. RFCs in particular aren't nearly as effective as we'd like them to be. I find better luck at talk pages of relevant WikiProjects, or in some other context where there's a pre-existing group of focused regulars. Many examples of such groups can be found at project-space talk pages. The trouble with this is that such pre-existing groups may at times represent entrenched biases (I'm thinking of, say, WT:MOSTM, the talk page for a guideline that I'm less and less sure represents consensus). This problem may be mitigated by finding more than one such group, but to some extent we have to work with the materials we're given.

I'll look back over the essay and see if it can be pulled down out of the sky a bit. I certainly didn't intend it to address any world but than the real one. Thanks for the feedback. -GTBacchus^(talk) 16:30, 3 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]