Wikipedia talk:Consensus polling

It's too complicated

I can barely wrap my head around it here. And I've been on Wikipedia for a while. Getting new users to understand this would be difficult. But more importantly:

It's instruction creep, with lots of procedures which makes even the smallest proposal crazy complicated.
It's voting, and voting is evil. It encourages ballot-stuffing, arguments over process, and all the other evil things about voting.
It's essentially the same thing we have now, only it puts the consensus threshold at 90%, which would mean controversial debates would be much harder to solve.

It sounds like a great idea in theory, but I think would fail miserably in practice. Fagstein 19:12, 9 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It was developed at the Omidyar Network to resolve a four month dispute about how to invest $25,000 of funding (link, requires registration). The site is currently conducting a poll on scholarships to conferences (link). ICANN are starting to use it on their wiki (link), as is ICANN's At-Large Advisory Committee (conducted on internal wiki).

Of course this may not be the ideal process for many issues, but for many issues there is a temptation to avoid or end discussion and push proposals through in a vote. This is more or less an attempt to combine the two. I would encourage everyone to try this out and see if it actually works. --bainer (talk) 02:44, 10 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Minimum people too high

I agree that this is complicated, but every piece of the process has been thought out and explained adequately. I think for large changes, this would be an excellent way of organizing discussion that should definitely be tried. My primary complaint is that most discussions are not large enough to achieve the minimum involvement of 50 people, because their subjects - such as deletion of a single article, or minor revision of a WP:CSD rule - simply do not concern that many people. I'd like to see a "scaled-down" version for this type of debate. Deco 05:52, 11 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The numbers given are merely an example, and naturally can be changed to suit whoever is using the poll. The number of people is probably the most variable, since the consensus threshold really ought to be high to ensure the results are well accepted.

This method is probably not useful for individual deletions, I envisage it being more useful for things like drafting new Manual of Style guidelines, or revisions to policies, issues which are not so urgent or so many in number. It's mainly intended to be used whenever people would be otherwise tempted to conduct a regular voting poll. --bainer (talk) 08:39, 11 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

m:instruction creep

Sorry, but no. Also voting is evil, Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy, consensus does not equate to 90%, and I don't see a demonstrated need for this. >Radiant< 21:28, 11 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Excuse me, but there is nothing to be afraid of in giving structure to consensus. The links you cited are not relevant. --DavidH Oz Au 03:07, 22 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]