On 7/8/07, Zoney zoney.ie@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/07/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
- AfD is not a vote;
- Admins who count votes should not be closing AfDs.
- 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