On 6/26/07, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
If large amount of votes fail to meet common sense they are to be ignored. If something is a copyvio despite a mass amount of votes [baseless] contradicting this, they should be ignored. Ideally closing admin shouldn't have views on the discussion weighting the comments in an unbiased manner.
Historically AFD was never intended to be a vote. Polls can help to determine consensus but they are not absolute. Each closure can have special circumstances. Admins should delete/keep something despite votes if necessary. This is good practice.
Otherwise you are promoting sock/meatpuppetry. There are plenty of non-problem free articles where different approaches on the topic exist. So a group of politically motivated people can infest a series of AfDs and get otherwise good articles deleted. Or the contrary, a group of politically motivated people can '''keep''' a nonsense/useless article even if it would be deleted otherwise.
We do have far too many deletion discussions on en.wikipedia, in a stable encyclopedia not many deletion discussions should occur. I believe the number of deletion discussions will decrease on the long run but in the meanwhile I expect it to sky rocket more. We may consider hourly listings at this rate rather than the current daily.
Also AfD, MfD, RfA, CfD has a group of resident voters. Decisions there are made by this "elite" group that is representing the minority of the general wiki. IMHO this should be discouraged.
- White Cat
On 6/27/07, Zoney zoney.ie@gmail.com wrote:
Consensus is a favorite word on Wikipedia, pulled out on all occasions whether on AfD, policy decisions, or simple article content matters. Going by the dictionary definition of "consensus" (e.g. on Wiktionary) or our own encyclopaedia article on consensus, can we really claim that decision-making on Wikipedia is by consensus?
Historically many decisions seemed to mostly go by majority (of small group of debate/vote participants) or large majority for change. Now, partly on the basis of "voting is evil", there seems to be more and more decisions made after "debate", where realistically, the action taken afterwards (or during) is either arbitrary, majority wish (going by comment counting/argument weighting rather than vote counting), or simply rule by the strong-minded who just do what they wish when they've at least some people to back them up (indeed perhaps not even that). I would suggest few decisions are made from truly forming consensus between debate participants, let alone considering the wider community.
Really - is there any hope of having a fixed method of decision-making on Wikipedia, rather than a shambolic pretence of achieving consensus that just allows groups to make decisions in different circumstances according to different methods as it suits them?
Zoney
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I don't really see articles closed against the consensus, though. They seem to be closed with the consensus, after all, that's what a consensus is, basically a vote. Occassionally something strange happens, but generally it's the vote.
KP