[WikiEN-l] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/8/18 Kat Walsh <mindspillage at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Charles
> Matthews<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>>> Well said. That debate was resolved back in the days when we actually
>>> reached consensus occasionally! There are too many people for that to
>>> work, these days. However hard you try, you never find a solution that
>>> everyone will accept.
>>>
>> Hmmm, that seems to assume consensus = no yelling, rather than 80%
>> support or whatever. As if special interest groups can always block
>> change. (Now that rings a bell, but we need to be careful about the
>> retrospective history.)
>>
>> Charles
>
> 4 out of 5 Wikipedians agree, consensus = 80%.
>
> What exactly counts as "consensus" is another industrial-sized can of
> worms. I think we slipped into "rough consensus" long ago, and are now
> drifting into supermajorities as a rough substitute, with occasional
> exceptions. Lots of people wanting something doesn't necessarily make
> them right, though it's often a decent guide to it...

We completed the drift into supermajorities a year or two ago.
Decisions on individual articles are still sometimes made by consensus
because there aren't many people interested in them, but any decisions
involving more than about a dozen people resort to a simple vote.
"Rough consensus" only differs from supermajority when there is
someone authorised to draw a conclusion from it and they are willing
to do more than count votes. The only such authorisation is crats
deciding RFAs and they stopped being willing to do more than count
votes a while back.