User:Mrt3366/Experience/Consensus/comment
- The original comment lies here.
- Hello, Wikid77 here. I have read your essay about wp:consensus, and understand the frustrations with the current system. In many cases, "management by consensus" has become a slanted form of "management by committee" as "management by self-appointed committee" rather than control by a broad consensus of active Wikipedians. To overcome the current powerplays, in gaming the consensus viewpoints, I think Wikipedia will need to run wide-ranging user surveys to gain "1,001 random opinions" (3% margin of error) as done with political polls. However, I think your point about "governance" is a valid priority, if only those in charge were more objective and pro-active to stop the games. The core concept behind "consensus" was to be a near unanimous consent, focused around a mutual compromise agreement, of editors working together in good faith (not insulting others, or else removed from the agreement). The deduction I have used is: "Two people discuss an issue, and one says they have reached consensus but the other disagrees". The way true "consensus" would stop the committee could be a lone voice insisting, "I object" and then the decision would be stopped, until a true consensus was formed. Unfortunately, such mutual agreements (as compromises) are very time-consuming, and the result in practice has been, instead, "We discussed this issue in an RfC last year which established consensus, and 'You do not have consensus' to change that viewpoint". For people who want to control the rules, then majority vote (with "consensus thumping") is the preferred method (as "tyranny of the majority"), and they often drag any dissenter to wp:ANI claiming the dissenter's repeated requests to change consensus as wp:DE "disruptive" to so-called harmony on Wikipedia. So, we are back to "governance" which depends on fair-minded admins to police the consensus games, and declare "consensus dissolved" when dissenters say no. Hence, I think the solution is to have more fair-minded admins, and they could block the biased admins who do not respect a broad consensus which includes most people but instead favor the majority-vote style of powergames. -Wikid77 (talk) 08:44, 6 June 2013 (UTC)
- Young was simply one of hundreds of anonymous editors assiduously pushing POVs on Wikipedia. They get support from the like-minded. Reason can be anything hatred towards various creeds or a particular theory or a person who they think swindled them, or a celebrity. Qworty aka Robert Clark Young himself said, after making 13,000 edits to wikipedia, “Wikipedia is the great postmodern novel, Wikipedia is ‘not truth’ … Wikipedia, like any other text, is not reality.”
Andrew Leonard wonders, “If Qworty has been allowed to run free for so long — sabotaging the ‘truth’ however he sees fit, writing his own postmodern novel — how many others are also creating spiteful havoc under the hood, where no one is watching?”
—Many!That fact of the matter is[1], ″the smart ones carry on for years, by adhering to the letter of Wikipedia’s byzantine internal rules, its love of anonymity and its childlike mantra of “Assume Good Faith” (“agf” is a key piece of Wikipedia jargon, and is frequently used as a very effective shield and weapon by people there who do very little good at all)″. Mr T(Talk?) 05:46, 25 June 2013 (UTC)