Category talk:Wikipedia failed proposals

threshold for "rejected"

What's the real threshold for "rejected"? what happens in practice?

Right now the page says:

Policy is adopted by consensus decision making. Although the threshold of acceptance is informal, usually "unanimity minus two" applies in practice, meaning, any pair of people who can hold up a substantial dialogue on the problems of the proposal can block it, with only nominal or tacit support, i.e. the comments are allowed to stand rather than be reverted or challenged, or, an uninvolved third person says "yes I agree", and that is enough to block the proposal.

If this statement is controversial, debate it here. But really it seems to just describe what really goes on: a proposed policy tends to either die because it's not coming to consensus due to an ongoing dialogue about it, or, it tends to go ahead. Single objectors tend not to be able to block new policies, nor even the pair of objectors alone, without some third party support that keeps encouraging them. Maybe it's really unanimity minus one, but, it seems to take three to resist a policy successfully (two to debate, one to encourage). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.177.74.3 (talk • contribs) 21:28, 11 June 2005‎