On Behalf Of Brian Corr
A) Seek Consensus, But Vote: For example, most of the
organizations have a board of director that votes and uses majorities
when
necessary, but most hesitate to accept a vote if it is
close, and they
prefer to achieve something approaching consensus, but will accept a
decision
if there is a large majority (this seems similar to
Wikipedia).
Yes, this is one of the things we're trying to pin down with VfD policy
revisions: see [[Wikipedia:Deletion policy]] and [[Wikipedia
talk:Deletion policy]] for exact details, but we are going with majority
vote, and qualifying voters.
One reason why true consensus doesn't really work in Wikipedia is that
voters are not stakeholders, as in your example of American Friends
Service Committee (AFSC). The ease of editing in Wikipedia means any
passing joker can throw a pebble into the gears and jam the system. So
true consensus works only in a membership which is filtered in some way,
or voters are stakeholders in the result.
So in the revised voting procedures for VfD, we try to filter or
distinguish stakeholders from ballot stuffers -- valid voters must have
existed for a while (days to weeks) and have made 100 article edits.
This seems to be a reasonable enough of a requirement to make sure
voters are stakeholders in Wikipedia's coherence. This isn't the first
time, the Logo vote (gasp!) also stipulated voters have at least 10
edits to their name.
-Fuzheado