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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