If large amount of votes fail to meet common sense they are to be ignored.
If something is a copyvio despite a mass amount of votes [baseless]
contradicting this, they should be ignored. Ideally closing admin shouldn't
have views on the discussion weighting the comments in an unbiased manner.
Historically AFD was never intended to be a vote. Polls can help to
determine consensus but they are not absolute. Each closure can have special
circumstances. Admins should delete/keep something despite votes if
necessary. This is good practice.
Otherwise you are promoting sock/meatpuppetry. There are plenty of
non-problem free articles where different approaches on the topic exist. So
a group of politically motivated people can infest a series of AfDs and get
otherwise good articles deleted. Or the contrary, a group of politically
motivated people can '''keep''' a nonsense/useless article even if
it would
be deleted otherwise.
We do have far too many deletion discussions on en.wikipedia, in a stable
encyclopedia not many deletion discussions should occur. I believe the
number of deletion discussions will decrease on the long run but in the
meanwhile I expect it to sky rocket more. We may consider hourly listings at
this rate rather than the current daily.
Also AfD, MfD, RfA, CfD has a group of resident voters. Decisions there are
made by this "elite" group that is representing the minority of the general
wiki. IMHO this should be discouraged.
- White Cat
On 6/27/07, Zoney <zoney.ie(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Consensus is a favorite word on Wikipedia, pulled out on all occasions
whether on AfD, policy decisions, or simple article content matters. Going
by the dictionary definition of "consensus" (e.g. on Wiktionary) or our
own
encyclopaedia article on consensus, can we really claim that
decision-making
on Wikipedia is by consensus?
Historically many decisions seemed to mostly go by majority (of small
group
of debate/vote participants) or large majority for change. Now, partly on
the basis of "voting is evil", there seems to be more and more decisions
made after "debate", where realistically, the action taken afterwards (or
during) is either arbitrary, majority wish (going by comment
counting/argument weighting rather than vote counting), or simply rule by
the strong-minded who just do what they wish when they've at least some
people to back them up (indeed perhaps not even that). I would suggest few
decisions are made from truly forming consensus between debate
participants,
let alone considering the wider community.
Really - is there any hope of having a fixed method of decision-making on
Wikipedia, rather than a shambolic pretence of achieving consensus that
just
allows groups to make decisions in different circumstances according to
different methods as it suits them?
Zoney
--
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