Wikipedia talk:Levels of consensus

Presumed consensus

Should we say something about presumed consensus when defining "consensus" in Wikipedia:Levels of consensus#Defining some terms? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 15:46, 3 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your improvements, and for the suggestion. Makes sense, I've added it in the assumptions section, I don't think it needs to be defined as a term in the context of this essay. Scribolt (talk) 08:28, 16 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding your add -

The concept of presumed consensus is policy (Wikipedia:EDITCON). So maybe "This can be true." should be "This is true."
I'm not sure what is being said by "This can also be said to apply to content which has gone through a peer review process, e.g. FAC."

Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:01, 16 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tweaked and updated. You're right that it is technically true, but in terms of the purpose of the essay, the level of consensus is so weak, it's effectively no consensus. I wanted to mention peer reviewed stuff, because by it's nature the content of the silent edit gets a bit more approval because we know someone has actually read it as opposed to missing it in their watchlist. And this also interacts a bit with BRD (which I know is not policy but is reflective of how a lot of editing actually goes) in that you generally need a good reason to remove or change long standing content. If you don't want to discuss, the original consensus on what the content should be stands. I don't want to get too into the weeds here, as this wasn't really the direction I wanted to go in for the essay (which was identifying and contrasting levels of consensus and how they arise), but feel free to further tweak. Scribolt (talk) 08:47, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Three things

@Scribolt, I've been thinking about this recently, and I think that the name "CONLEVEL" is causing an WP:UPPERCASE problem. People are guessing what it means from the name:

The level of consensus – that's how strong or weak the consensus is, right?
The level of consensus – that's the scope of the consensus, like whether it applies to one page or to the whole site, right?
The level of consensus – that's about how likely it is that the consensus represents the whole community's view, right?

It's the latter, of course, but I've seen editors claim that it's both of the other two. I don't see anything in Wikipedia:Consensus about the first two, and perhaps the absence of anything real is why people assume that it "obviously" is part of CONLEVEL. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:50, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting point, I think I agree with you with regards the name. CONLEVEL as-is contains four elements (not entirely in order here). First off, and most importantly, it establishes the principle you describe in your third bullet point (i.e. that it is possible to distinguish between a consensus held widely in the community and one that has more limited traction). Second and closely related is what this means in terms of behaviour and editing. If something can said to represent the wider communities view, then something that is less representative should not supersede it. Then we have an example of what this then means in practice; that policy with a high level of community consensus should not be disregarded due to an agreement formed within wikiproject representing a sub-set of the community. Lastly we have some content related to policy creation and maintenance which personally I think is unrelated and out of place.

With regards the first "misconception" bullet point. I've got some sympathy for those who use CONLEVEL as a shorthand for it, and one potential issue with the current name is that "levels" implies a vertical hierarchy (which could relate to size, strength or weight), whereas in fact we're actually talking about something more horizontal; how far the consensus reaches throughout the community. I don't like applying the hierarchy approach here in general, it can ignore important context. The current text already includes "widely" and "broadly", which is the right language. However, the misconception is amplified by the fact that in my view the current content doesn't adequately define on even high level terms what makes a consensus wide or broad. If it did so, it might also assist with people using it in the correctly and was one of main things I wanted to discuss in this essay. Should it be covered elsewhere in CONSENSUS? Hm, I'm not sure there are any real community norms that derive from a "strong" consensus versus a "weak" one, beyond possibly not trying to immediately re-litigate something that had recently and decisively settled. And a strong narrow consensus does not override a weak wide one as per CONLEVEL ;-).

The second bullet point you mention I think is less legitimate and simply people not reading things properly (either CONLEVEL when they quote it, or the closure of the discussion they are referring to). As it may be a common misconception it might be worth mentioning it explicitly somewhere but I'm not usually in favour of writing "this doesn't mean this" in such documents. If it goes anywhere, it's probably more guidance about closing RfCs or the implementation of discussion outcomes, it's not really a consensus related topic in my view.

Hope this rambling maybe helps your thought processes somewhat, thanks for raising it. Scribolt (talk) 08:49, 31 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Scribolt, I'm very interested in your thoughts, but I'm going offline for a while. A couple of links: location is dispositive and RFC results applied to other articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:20, 1 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I hope you feel better soon, I hope that my wall of text didn't contribute to it. Thank you for the links. I'm still doubtful as to how relevant / helpful the consensus policy itself can be in the situation Nikkimaria described; there is a consensus that a source is reliable for claiming X in article Y, and that then is is claimed this consensus applies use of the source in general. To extrapolate this, it would be the same as claiming that because there is a consensus not use non-MEDRS sources to support certain information in medical related articles we can't use non-MEDRS sources anywhere. Or to take this still further, there's consensus for AGF, so that means I can't write anything negative about a living person. None of this is really consensus related, although it's adjacent and people use the word consensus. It comes from people misreading discussions, poorly framed RfCs or inaccurate closes. Now this doesn't mean we can't have some text somewhere to try and counter this, but it's not going to be about consensus per se.

With regards to the location comment, this was the core of what I was getting at in the essay. The level of consensus (as we agree, the extent to which the community holds the view) can be expressed as the sum of the bullet points in the "so what does this mean" section (with the exception I guess of the explicitly wide scope identified, which was an attempt at least cover the above concern), with each element multiplied by a weighting of how importantly someone sees it. Some (for example BM based on the link and other comments I've seen from them e.g. here) would weight the page space / policy or guideline aspects far higher than I think you would, or indeed me, and would weight the "correctly advertised" parts far lower. From that perspective, their comment regarding the prospect of a wide consensus emerging from a user talk page is consistent with a belief that the wiki's standards are policy and rule derived, which I think is quite widely shared. I personally consider the page space / policy side of things to be more an aspect of the making sure the right stakeholders are involved, but it would have been negligent not to break it out separately as I wasn't intending the essay to be my soapbox. Scribolt (talk) 14:19, 1 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Been mulling this over a bit more, a few thoughts. If I could re-write the section entirely, I'd do the following:

Rename it Level of Consensus. A minor tweak with potentially only minor benefit. Has the advantage of not breaking the continuity of the well established shortcut and also reflecting that we're referring to the level of consensus that something has an not an arbitrary tiered structure.
Keep the first paragraph pretty much as-is, delete the rest.
New para, give some criteria for assessing the level of consensus for something, without trying to get too technical. The level of consensus for something within the community is primarily determined by how many editors could be said to be aware of and agree with it. Long standing content in policy or guidelines, well attended discussions on central noticeboards or well advertised RfCs can all usually be said to result in a high level of consensus. In all these cases, interested editors would have a reasonable opportunity provide input. A more local consensus would be one that a significant portion of the relevant part of the community would not necessarily be aware of.
Next para, provide some caveats and warnings. Don't want to draft something here atm, but should probably include something about Nikkimaria's concern, (i.e. respecting the scope of the discussion) and not to act contrary to existing policy and guidelines unnecessarily. Scribolt (talk) 18:06, 1 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]