[WikiEN-l] My favorite Wikipedia article ever

[John Lee]

On 7/8/07, Zoney <zoney.ie at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 08/07/07, John Lee <johnleemk at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > 1. AfD is not a vote;
> > 2. Admins who count votes should not be closing AfDs.
> > 3. An objective vote count is rarely an accurate gauge of whether an
> > article
> > ought to be kept or deleted; admins should be taking into account other
> > factors like AfDs when they gauge the consensus of the debate.
> >
> > Johnleemk
> >
>
> Again the redefinition of the word "consensus" to avoid meaning general
> agreement. No-one should ever have to "gauge" the consensus - if it is
> there, it's there - i.e. general agreement all round. If you don't have
> that, you don't have consensus. Admins should never have to make
> "controversial" decisions if decision-making in Wikipedia were actually by
> consensus.
>
> Now if people want to stop pretending, and call what Wikipedia looks for
> in
> decision making something other than consensus - fine. Otherwise decisions
> should strictly not be taken where there is not consensus. Of course this
> would bring the project to a standstill. So I suggest people stop using
> the
> word "consensus".
>
> I think a lot of people on Wikipedia now have a definition of "consensus"
> that means "Wikipedia's decision making mechanism" (whatever that actually
> happens to be in any given debate; sometimes genuine consensus, other
> times
> vote counting, super-majority, convincing arguments, everyone but a small
> minority or one or two individuals in agreement, whatever the action-taker
> gets away with, and so on)


Hehe, that is so true. However, I think in a lot of cases, there is no
consensus per se, but a decision is reached by taking other factors into
account. For instance, if an AfD has five people saying "delete", and
another five saying "merge and delete", then an admin would probably close
it as a "merge and redirect" because there is no consensus to delete the
content, but there is consensus that there should not be an article at the
title; why we can't merge and delete should be obvious to most people
reading this list.

I guess what I'm saying is that consensus does work in about half to two
thirds of cases, and in the rest, admins try to use common sense, which has
its pitfalls because common sense is rarely all too common. Consensus is the
foundation of Wikipedia decision-making, but there are other factors
involved.

Johnleemk