On 04/07/05, Nathan J. Yoder <njyoder(a)energon.org> wrote:
As the
community size becomes large the probability of a unanimous
decision becomes infinitesimal and the ability of one member to block
a decision becomes a target for disruption.
That's very true, which is why it seems silly to call it a 'consensus'
rather than a super majority. There should be official policy
somewhere outlining exactly what percentage of votes is needed to pass
a given thing (e.g. "four-fifths majority is required to appoint an
admin").
I'm not sure if there's a single list (never looked too closely at
policy pages), but from WP:RFA > About RFA > Nomination Process -
"Nominations usually remain for seven days, for votes and comments.
Bureaucrats may at their discretion extend this when consensus is
unclear; the threshold for consensus on this page is roughly 80
percent support."
For many of
our votes in the community, Wikipedia uses a two stage
near-consensus process which is highly effective. For example, VFD:
Members of the community state both their 'vote' and their position
and have an ability to discuss their votes and change their votes in
an open environment that is free of true coercion.
What about cases where people are being recruited to vote on something
like that? I've seen at least one VfD where people were recruited
from another source of like-minded people to skew the vote. I'm not
sure there is something that can be done about that without potential
for abuse, but it's a shady thing to do.
From the deletion guidelines: "For example,
administrators can
disregard votes and comments if they feel that there is strong
evidence that they were not made in good faith. Such "bad faith" votes
include those being made by sock puppets, being made anonymously, or
being made using a new userid whose only edits are to the article in
question and the voting on that article."
It depends. Again, I haven't paid much attention to VfD lately, other
than pages I brought there - I simply don't have the time - but used
to trawl it daily. From my recollection... Lots of articles, usually
vanity ones about an individual or organisation (*especially* ones
involving some kind of internet forum) got placed on VfD and hit by a
lot of new users, anons, &c voting keep. [pokes around] Here's an
example:
Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Charles_Mason_(Revolutionary)
Thirteen keep, nine delete; not a "clear consensus" Decision to
delete. Why? Every one of the keep votes was a new or anon. user,
often with inspired arguments (I particularly like one which
summarised as "Wikipedia should keep this because it was supressed by
the capitalist media so they can't verify it"), versus every delete
vote was by an established user (I recognised six of the nine names,
offhand). So you have a community consensus - delete - and a
background noise.
Is it right to do this? Yes, I suspect. It's an infinitely gamable
system, otherwise; the potential for abuse by ignoring such users is
less than the potential for abuse through sockpuppetry.
It's worth noting that floods of anonymous and new users very rarely
show up to vote "keep" on articles which get established during VfD as
being borderline notable - usually this is limited only to articles
which are otherwise reasonably indefensible. What that may be
construed as, of course, is for the reader.
(Incidentally, going through old VfDs, I found
Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Race_and_intelligence - does anyone else
get a weird problem displaying that page? I think there's an unmatched
<s></s> tag somewhere, and as a result it doesn't even display an edit
tab...)
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk