Richard and I seem to be your guinea pigs in the compromise experiments!
IN the Terrorism article, it is not exactly as it looks: my own position is not opposed to Jensen's but came out looking a bit like that on the Talk page. This is partly because the Islamic quotation link was inserted by Gareth Leng (who didn't sign his name!) and I expressed some enthusiasm for it in contrast to the hegemonic definition of the US government. My own position is one of inclusiveness, and the proposal of the author is actually what I too had in mind.
So, there is compromise floating around!
Nothing personal I assure you. I respect both of you because of your integrity and willingness to state your position and stick to it until it is worked out. Unfortunately, most leave before the we get a chance to figure out the position that was so upsetting.
You make a good point about the third author (Gareth) that I think actually helps to reach compromise, but we want to make sure that the compromise is truly about compromise and not consensus because one side has more voice. So in some ways, this has to be different than wikipedia to make sure we end up with something that is neutral and accurate. Basically, I think we all collaborate with compromise. I am thinking that there may be value in placing it into policy so that it happens sooner... the purpose being to not lose valuable editors and authors to tangential metadiscussion that only galvanizes our positions. If we can prevent going in these tangents, perhaps we can 'teach' people to compromise sooner while collaborating to reach a neutral article that we can all feel good about. We need to be committed to it somehow, though. Thus, the idea to make it a policy. I think the editorial council should weigh in at some point.
