[WikiEN-l] Consensus is dying...

[Stephen Bain]

On 9/3/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
> But what did you intend as a definitive threshold? To ensure accuracy
> for any important decision it would have to be around 90%. Surely if
> one person raises a valuable point, and one that is worth voting 'not
> yet' for, at least 10% will follow. But 90% will help reduce the
> effect of mild sockpuppet use etc. Then again, if we allow experienced
> users to strike votes, we should be going for 95%...

The person who proposes the consensus poll sets the threshold in the
static contract. If the threshold is set too low, then people will
vote "not yet" and the contract can then be withdrawn and the person
can then try again with a higher threshold. It's a little awkward to
change what's in the static contract, but in practice people will
probably come to realise that a certain percentage will work most of
the time.

The beauty of the consensus poll model is that the voting choices are
"yes" and "not yet", in which case the person can propose changes to
the action plan so they are happy (providing that standards of
behaviour are maintained so that people work constructively in editing
the plan).

So the substance of the proposal is always reacting to what people
actually want to achieve. If 10% of people aren't happy, then the
proposal is continuously tweaked until enough people are happy.

(Really, tweaking continues until enough people are happy to satusfy
the cloture threshold, at which point the proposal is locked, and the
final consensus is judged a set time after this point.)

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com