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Complaint: Priority Inversion Specifics: Pseudo-Consensus Overturning the Big Three (and the Five Pillars)
JA = Jon Awbrey MB = Matt Brown
MB: So I have some questions:
MB: 2. Do you think the editors should be forced to discuss the issue with you before removing this block quote?
JA: The general question is whether editors can be forced to do anything. The answer is that WP has no enforcement power against any persons, and thus it has no enforceable policies whatsoever. All Management can do is to block IPs, but that has no effect on persons except to introduce a minor inconvenience into their ability to edit pages.
JA: I don't believe in force. I believe in education and information. That is -- was -- the only reason for believing that WP might be worth spending some time and energy on. But you can't force people to act according to the primary WP policies if they don't want to, and it does not seem like they want to. Something like 90% of what people have been saying to me on this List has been this: "But we can't really do it by the Book, so let's just do it any way we darn well please." That pretty much confirms what I had already seen in WP itself.
MB: 3. Do you think consensus should not be used to guide decisions regarding Wikipedia content?
JA: The question is not what I think. The question is what [[WP:Policy]] says. But there is no question as to what it says:
JA: The pages on [[WP:POLICY]] clearly identify the three content-definitive and non-negotiable policies of WP as [[WP:NOR]], [[WP:NPOV]], and [[WP:VERIFY]], reiterating three times over on each of their individually dedicated pages, with no substantive variation, the following norm of participation in WP:
Quote: These three policies are non-negotiable and cannot be superseded by other policies or guidelines, or by editors' consensus.
JA: You can't force people to prefer sourced information over ungrounded opinion -- it's either something in the their bones, something they are trained to do, or something that the hard knocks of reality have cudgeled them into.
JA: When a small number of editors put their heads together and "vote" a bit of unsourced opinion into an article, then those editors are arrogating to themselves the role of the primary source for that opinion, which is to say that the opinion in question orginates with those editors, and that spells Original Research with a capital "O" "R", and that spells trouble in WP City.
JA: This is one of the main reasons why editorial opinion, con-sensus or con-census or otherwise, is just plain not permitted to overrule NOR, NPOV, and VERIFY.
Jon Awbrey
MB: 4. If so, then what decision making process should replace it?
MB: I hope I'm not putting words in Jon Awbrey's mouth by stating that he thinks the problem is that when consensus can be defined as "Me and three of my friends I IM'd to come and agree with me", there's a problem. Especially when a "consensus" among like-minded people on the same side of an issue can be used to trump core Wikipedia policies and standard Wikipedia ways of working.
MB: Part of the issue is that there's always tension between deciding an issue for good on the one hand, and having every single opinionated person coming along to any article being able to re-open things for which an adequate conclusion has already been reached.
MB: Standard Wikipedia policy / practise here is that there are no permanent decisions on Wikipedia apart from core policy, but that if an issue has been decided by strong rough consensus, we're resistant to re-opening the issue unless the one wishing to re-open it can convince enough people that the previous rough consensus no longer holds.
MB: "Strong rough consensus" in my opinion means an issue that for the vast majority of contributors has a result they can live with - even if not outright approve - and that has been reached after a satisfactory discussion, a satisfactory attempt at compromise, a respect for policy, and with sufficient editors involved that are representative on the issue.
MB: IMO, a rough consensus is not a strong one, a good one, if it has been arrived at without discussion, without attempts to find common ground, without regard for over-riding policy, or without sufficient numbers of contributors or variety of points-of-view to be truly representative.
MB: There are many editors on Wikipedia who want to truly do the right thing and achieve good results. There are enough others, however, who want articles to say exactly what THEY wish them to say, and who will game the rules and do everything they can to get their way. (There are probably other categories of editors, of course, but this is simplifying).
MB: I have a feeling that another issue Jon has is that some contributors are too willing to remove things from articles if they don't like them, regardless of the work that went into them, the usefulness of the content, or in any way trying to achieve consensus for that removal.
MB: Jon, do I have your positions right?
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