Rhobite said:
Consensus works when one choice is safe or
conservative, such as keeping an article on VfD.
As far as I am aware conservativism is not the sole basis on which we
currently make decisions on en.Wikipedia. All editing decisions are
decided by consensus, for instance, whether to keep or change, where
obviously the most conservative choice would be to change.
I'm swayed by David's argument, however. Apparently the software was not
always configured in this way, but was recently changed unilaterally by
the developers. The vote should have been cast as a ratification of this
change, in which case the ratification clearly failed and the change
should be reversed.