User talk:HarvardMan2000

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Your refactoring of an ongoing discussion on Talk:Murder of Meredith Kercher

Please do not do anything like this ever again. Reframing a conversation after others have commented in such manner is completely unacceptable and will lead to an immediate removal of your editing privileges. Further, your other recent contributions are often full of blatant assumptions of bad faith against other editors, and border on disruptive. The top of this section summarizes the rules under which you are allowed to contribute, and joining the discussion late doesn't exempt you of following them. If you are unable to edit in a collegial manner, please kindly find another place where to promote your point of view. MLauba ^(Talk) 19:18, 6 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

In addition to the above, please stop messing about with the format of the discussion pages. It's pointless anyway - as I've said on that page, we don't hold votes here, with the exception of the election of editors to positions such as ArbCom or Admin, or RFCU/ArbCom cases (which clearly do have to have an element of plurality). Consensus on content, policy, guidelines, deletion and anything else in mainspace or projectspace is formed by discussion and relevance to Wikipedia policy, not by strength of numbers. See WP:DEMOCRACY. Thanks, Black Kite (t) (c) 20:42, 6 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

- Dear Sir/Madam: Your statement is incorrect. I have been reading Wikipedia in depth for several years. I have seen literally hundreds of voting procedures on this website, whether they are called "votes" or "consensus" or "tallies" or "feedback". My attempt at voting to elucidate consensus was perfectly consistent with those other procedures, although my format was somewhat original. I clearly indicated that the outcome of the vote would be used only as one piece of information in a formal unlock request. It was not necessary for me to seek consensus on this issue. I did that as a courtesy to try to respect everyone's feelings before filing an unlock request. Unfortunately, mine were not treated with similar courtesy. HarvardMan2000 (talk) 21:00, 6 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

- - It is perfectly possible, and preferable, to extract consensus through discussion. Separating a "vote" from the rationale actually makes it more difficult to analyse a discussion, as you are effectively separating the discourse into two separate sections. Also, strength of numbers does not equal consensus, which can make it even more confusing. For example, at articles for deletion, two editors advocating that an article should be Kept, and explaining their rationales for doing so with regard to Wikipedia policy, will always trump any number of editors advocating deleting an article but giving no cogent reason for doing so (for example saying "it's a bad article"). For the above reasons, discussion is always preferred except in the examples given above, especially in regard to a contentious article where a very large number of new SPA accounts have been active recently. Black Kite (t) (c) 21:09, 6 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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