There's no such thing as consensus when you're talking about the scope of the encyclopedia. People will say that birds don't exist, that the sun is not a star because it's a space ship circling the globe with a big flashlight, and that Area 51 is a place where the government is hiding the mole people that we've enslaved to dig tunnels for the rich to evacuate into when WW3 happens. There will never be 100% consensus on anything—even on the most verifiable and proven universal truths—and so by saying there's "false consensus" is meaningless. If the bar is 100% agreement by everyone who cares to speak up, the encyclopedia can't say that anything is true. And if that's the case, what's the point of an encyclopedia?
At the end of the day the encyclopedia was always written through the consensus of experts.
Early encyclopedias solved this problem by hiring experts. Wikipedia doesn't hire them, it just cites them.
It has only been recently that our cynical postmodern internet hordes have decided experts are somehow only equally worthy of trust as the high-school dropout uncles of facebook and the brain-worm infested politicians on the news.
> Citing experts is good practice, but invoking them to silence dissent is anti-scientific.
That's not really what we're discussing here. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The encyclopedia should report things that are widely regarded to be factual as facts. They should not give equal time to every looney tune with a pet theory.
Noteworthy dissent about complex subjects doesn't come from the unqualified, it comes from other qualified people with differing ideas.
