User:Jorge Stolfi/DoW/Consensus

UNSORTED DRAFT - NOT READABLE YET

Many guidelines and policies in the "Wikipedia:" namespace claim to be consensus. In common parlange, that words means a decision that has the approval, even if reluctant, of a vast majority of the people concerned; which may be the people affected by the decision, or those who are ingrade to enforce it, or the members of some entity which has the right to make the decision.

However, a closer look shows that they are not consensual, in any remotely meaningful sense of that word.

That is definitely not what it means here.

In Wikipedia, the word "consensus" means, at best, that a handful of editors collaborated in writing the policy, and its text has more or less stabilized. It does not mean that the majority of the Wikipedia editors agree with it, or even that there has been any attempt to conduct a fair poll. It does not mean that the policy was sanctioned by the Wikipedia Foundation or any official Wikipedia comittee. Indeed, there does not appear to be any formal clearance process for policies posted in the "Wikipedia:" namespaces. Instead, policies are generally written by a handful of self-selected editors, and may be enforced by any editor who feels like doing so.

There is an official Wikipedia definition of "consensus", defined by a fairly short and readable page. However, that page mainly deals with how to end disputes about an article or the text of a guideline page. Thus, for that page, a "consensus" is merely the end of an editorial dispute.

Optimistically, such "consensus" may mean that the parties involved in the dispute found a solution that they all agree with. However, it may also mean that all parties just got tired of fighting and just left the debate. In neither case the so-called "consensus" has its

Examples

Notability guidelines

A case in point is the Wikipedia:Notability guideline and its many subpages. The banner at the top of the page says that it is a "consensus". Whose consensus was it? Namely, which and how many readers (or editors) have been polled to ascertain that it is indeed a consensus?

When this question was asked in the Wikipedia talk:Notability page, it was shrugged off with the claim that it was "the result of collaborative efforts by many, many, many editors", and that "changes are proposed, discussed, and modified until a rough consensus can be found that the proposed change can be made to the guideline, otherwise the proposal is scrapped". But further enquiries eventually yielded a pointer to a straw poll on various items of that policy. The replies to that RFC (request for comments) comprise about 180 votes, and the tabulation shows that the items which passed (which I can't even understand what they are about) were very far from consensus.

One would expect that whoever wrote "consensus" at the top of the article must have made some tabulation of all those comments, right? At least counted how many people took part in those discussions? (Yes, you guessed, this is merely a rhetorical question.)

• Is the number of "Wikipedia policy" pages finite? Countable, at least?

Editors who complain about the policies are usually told to read the discussions on the policy's talk pages. One cannot expect ordinary editors to have the time to read through the archive pages of the talk page of this subsidiary page of a special-purpose policy sub-page. So the "tacit approval" for those policies does not imply general approval, but merely that the sheer volume of the discussion pages (and the near-pessimal talk page organization and archiving mechanism) restrict the pariticipation to editors who are interested in the policy.

Are those 200 or so editors a substantial sample of Wikipedia editors? WP must have now about 10,000 "active" editors (defined arbitrarily as editors who made at least one edit per day on the average, over the last month). So, even if the notability guidelines were indeed a "consensus" among those 200 editors, that is only 2% of the active editorship.

Could that at least be a random 2% sample? Hardly. Editors who have the energy to debate policies at such great length are probably people who enjoy writing rules for other people, rather than write articles on protozoa or Britney Spears; which presumably is not a common inclination among those 10,000 brave good souls who keep wikipedia thriving.

Indeed most of those who write in the Wikipedia talk pages make heavy use of jargon and abbreviations like 'SNG' or 'WP:N' all the time. It is hard not to conlude that the talk page is the forum for a clique of 'insiders', who are not particularly worried about making themselves understood by 'outsiders'.

Most Wikipedia guidelines lack legitimacy: they are just the work of a small number of editors who have no mandate or authority beyond their own opinion. Althoug those policies are just indicative, they are presented, labeled and worded in such a way that any editor who come across them will think that they are somehow "official", and carry more weight than his own opinion. Because of that false impression, many editors are now enforcing Wikipedia policies, even those they personally dislike, because they mistakenly believe that those guidelines are rules.

• If those numbers are anywhere near the right ballpark, then indeed this guideline reflects the opinion of a microscopic and self-selected tyrannical minority of the editors, and labeling it as "consensus" is a flat-out lie.

• If a policy actually goes against the opinons and expectations of the majority of the editors, especially the newbies, presenting it as a "consensus" is doing Wikipedia a terrible disservice.

Although the guideline was by 180+

It has been argued that the RFC for the Notability guideline was announced in CENT and VPP and watchlist headers, and ran for 30 days. But nevertheless only 180+ answered (and this is considered high as RFCs go). But which editors will even understand what the RFC is about, and how it could impact their work? Who, among those editos who understand the RFC, are likely to click on the link? Which of those will care to read all the jargon- and acronym-laden discussion to understand what the items being voted mean? The editors who are likely to pass all these hurdles are the deletionists who worked on the policy and therefore are generally in favor of it. Certaninly the novice editors, who have been hit the hardest by the deletionists, will not have the foggier]st idea of what is going on in that corner of Wikspace.

It has been argued that every other policy and guideline likely has similar low participation in its development.

As for consensus, the consclusion I draw from the preceding posts is that this guideline was approved, at best, by some majority of the 200 or less people who took part in the discussions. Those were neither "random readers", nor "random editors", nor "random regular editors", but mainly "editors who have WP:Notability on their watchlists". That the "notability" requirement is not a wider consensus is proven by the large number of articles on allegedly "non-notable" subjects that get created, not only by novices but also by experienced editors, and which are proposed for deletion solely for that reason. Every such article must be counted as a vote against the notability guideline; and therefore those votes swamp those 180 responses to the RFC, by a couple orders of magnitude.

Verifiability, in constrast, has few or no detractors in general, although occasionally an editor will disagree on whether a particular source is reliable or not.