User:Nathan Johnson/dissent



The Wikipedia article defines the word dissent as non-agreement to the prevailing idea. Two common antonyms are agreement and consensus. One of the key Wikipedia policies is that decisions are made by consensus. It is the purpose of this essay to show that in reaching a true consensus, there must be dissent, and that dissent must be allowed to be freely expressed and commented upon.

Dissent aversion refers to the phenomenon in which a panel of three justices will often reach a unanimous decision because only one holds a strong opinion on the case. While one of the others may disagree slightly, they will support the opinion for a variety of reasons, but a major one being that dissent is bad for the working environment between colleagues. In many discussions on Wikipedia, there is widespread dissent aversion; users skim past a discussion and weakly oppose the majority, but simply don't care enough to write a detailed opposition. Because they aren't forced to express an opinion like the justice, they may simply ignore it, or they may add a comment weakly oppose, or even weakly supporting the majority. All the options lead to a systematic bias in the results of the discussion.

In many discussions, there is implicit approval to suppress dissent especially when users are put forward in any type of review by the community. It is in these cases that a minority dissent should be encouraged because by disagreeing with the majority, the dissenters bring a different view to the discussion and may allow others to simply add a comment that they agree with the dissenters opinion.

In courts with more than three justices, dissent aversion is less likely. However, outside a vocal minority who dissent early and often, it does not appear that dissent is actively encouraged on Wikipedia. But it should be! We have many users, much more than three where dissent aversion is most likely to take place. With so many users opining on a discussion, there should be a wide variety of viewpoints expressed with more than simple yes or no votes. Each opinion, no matter how trivial, adds to the cumulative knowledge about a topic. Only by allowing each user to articulately express their opinion can the community fully evaluate a topic.

Another reason that dissent is looked down on is because of the psychological concept social proof. The essence of this proof is that people will agree with the group regardless of moral or ethical issues and change their behavior to conform to social norms based on the approval of the group. Further, it says that peers will want what other peers want or have. The psychological social proof is related to the economic idea of positional good. On Wikipedia, a good example of a positional good is adminship. Due to the present editing model employed by Wikipedia, administrators are necessary. There are certain administrative tasks that must be accomplished or else the encyclopedia will fall into disrepair. However, there are many users that wish to become administrators without any wish to perform these tasks. On the one hand, one might argue that there is no harm in granting them administrator privileges, but on the other there is harm because it is rewarding someone privileges based on their desire to attain a positional good.