[Wikipedia-l] No consensus

Luna lunasantin at gmail.com
Tue Jan 16 20:13:07 UTC 2007


On 1/16/07, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's very nice in Wikipedia to work with consensus. But what if no
> consensus
> is found? How is it decided then?
>

That would depend a bit on the nature of the dispute, I guess?

In an article or other content dispute, perhaps the involved editors should
do their best to make necessary concessions, possibly including a section on
the article to describe the nature of the controversy at hand (this assumes
all parties are acting more or less reasonably).

In terms of policy debate, en.wikipedia at least is pretty deeply fleshed
out and institutionalized, as opposed to a new project where there's little
existing practice or precedent -- people are usually trying to gain
consensus to *change* something, in this sort of environment. If no such
consensus is achieved, we usually fall back on the status quo of existing
practice.

Some situations can't always be resolved that way, in which case there's no
easy solution. Or if there is, I'm missing it.

-Luna


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