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Tony Sidaway wrote:
I think that's a very good thing. If we work by consensus, then
the first thing we have to acknowledge is that there is no
consensual definition of consensus, although there is general
satisfaction that Wikipedia usually makes decisions that everybody
can live with. The latter is termed "rough consensus" and, as an
expression of the reasonableness and tolerance of Wikpiedians, is
what keeps Wikipedia from breaking.
I totally agree with you here. I'm glad you brought the discussion
here because it's a great place to make my next point. It's also a
great way to clarify why my criticism of your RFC is a criticism of
AFD and not of you. My point here is that by letting people vote, AFD
creates the atmosphere that people are discussing the issue to find
out what the consensus is. I view that as a farce. In reality,
people tally votes, and the closing admin determines what percentage
will count as "consensus" today.
The fact that "there is no consensual definition of consensus" really
means that people can't agree on what percentage of votes should count
as consensus. But no percentage of votes could possibly count as a
consensus. "80% of the votes = consensus" means "It's okay to roll
over the opinions of 20% of the people if you have a big enough
majority." That's not what consensus means. What happened in your RFC
shows how people with differing arbitrary percentage standards of
"consensus" can think they are "right" but have no rational basis for
argument in support of their position. In my view, any numerical
quantification of consensus is wrong, regardless of what number is
picked. Consensus is a rational agreement among reasonable parties,
and that means that people have reflected and discussed the issue and
found a way to come to agreement. Because AFD creates this illusion
of determining what consensus is, it perpetuates the myth that
articles deleted by an AFD vote were deleted by a legitimate mandate
of the community. In reality, it means anyone who can get enough
votes can dictate policy to the minority without discussion, and
without real consensus.
Now you might be wondering why I said I agree with you. What I agree
about is that I think admins should be greatly influenced by the rest
of the community on what articles should be deleted, but I think the
final decision should ultimately be in their hands. This is mainly
why I am so strenuously advocating pure wiki deletion, with admins
reserving the power of page protection, as a substitute for AFD. Pure
wiki deletion is transparent in that it puts the power in the hands of
the administrators explicitly, rather than claiming power for "the
people" while implicitly leaving the decision in the hands of the
closing admin. When an article is deleted under PWD, we know who is
responsible for it and we can question their reasoning in an amicable
and direct way. It also forces real discussion of deletion, just like
the concept of the Wiki forces discussion of content edits, because
it's no longer possible to delete an article just by getting enough
votes to break over the "consensus" threshold. Imagine if we had
votes for content edits: That would mean that the opinions of 1/3
people on Wikipedia don't matter! A nightmare, to be sure, but it's
one that we're living under with AFD as relates to deletion.
All of this isn't important, though. I happen to think that PWD is the
best solution to the problem, but I would like to hear other ideas.
Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but it occurs to
me that I haven't heard many other people advancing alternate
solutions. What I want to do is try to move the discussion toward what
we will replace AFD with, and why the replacement will be any improvement.
Ryan
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