[WikiEN-l] "Consensus" and decision making on Wikipedia

[White Cat]

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 at 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
> --
> ~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
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