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This example gets to a fundamental reality in group decision making: some issues for some people are too important to them for them to accept the group deciding
by advisedwang 4y ago
This example gets to a fundamental reality in group decision making: some issues for some people are too important to them for them to accept the group deciding against them. That can be perfectly legitimate - for example a minority shareholder should not accept a majority owner giving a dividend only to the minority; or a subset of a population should not accept a political process that strips them of rights.
Depending on how a decision system is set up and supported and what the people are willing to do, the outcomes can be very different. Some possible outcomes are deadlock (where no decisions can be made), disintegration (e.g. where people unilaterally act and group decision making ends), exception (where rules are suspended and some other process makes the decision this time) or violence (which could be state power enforcing a decision but also can be assassination etc).
It sounds like ArbCom is a managed form of exception to the usual consensus decision making. I hope its effective.
- viraptor 4y agoThe interesting part for me is how do other encyclopedias deal with this. It's not mentioned in the paper itself (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) but I'm sure this is not the only case and the paper volumes we used to buy decades ago dealt with similar issues, just much less visibility into the process. I actually can't find any good writeups about similar issues in the past, yet I'm sure various encyclopedias in Europe had a very different view on some details. There must've been internal editor conflicts too. With Wikipedia, we can just observe that in real time.
- travisjungroth 4y agoI’d guess part of it was that people cared less because it was their job.
- viraptor 4y agoI've met librarians and researchers before. Those people have some serious opinions. It's extremely unlikely that none of the encyclopedia editors cared. There were surely some doing this as their 9-5, but I bet this was a small fraction.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- travisjungroth 4y agoI don’t mean that none of them cared. Bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment about how the intensity can ramp up when the compensation is zero. On one hand, payment motivates people. On the other hand, when you hire volunteers you have selected for people who find pushing their specific view of the Holocaust to be its own reward. This is not likely to make the situation easier to resolve.
- advisedwang 4y agoAs far as I'm am aware most traditional encyclopedias rely on experts for such things, backstopped by traditional corporate governance. So basically the corporate owners pick experts based on their own motives and those experts set the direction and fine tuning of articles. Really the only group decision making happening is small committees (who can be overriden by executives) and the board of directors.