How do Wikipedians form consensus?

Wikipedians use various tools to help one another gather their knowledge of an object, subject or issue and mesh together the information to provide one full entry. Without these tools, contributing to Wikipedia would become more difficult, because of lack of organisation.

When an individual wishes to contribute to an entry, they can simply select the edit button above the article and begin to add, submit or alter slighty any content they believed should be altered. However, this can become troublesome if a person does not know previous edits to the pages, which could mean that their content is removed cause it already was posted and removed before.

This is one of the reasons that Wikipedia provides users with a discussion board and edit history on every entry. When a user wishes to edit an article, they are able to enter the discussion board to view what people have done, what people believe should be included, what members need to find (such as an image or more information on a specific topic) and anything that should be discussed before being submitted into the entry. The edit history also permits others to view previous edits and compare older entries to view how the entry has evolved and also gain insight into any content that is removed numerous times .

With tools like these in place, contributors are able to organise their information and gain a better knowledge of previous activities that have done on before for entries.