How “Consensus” Works on Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

1 pointnsajko2 comments

It’s not a wikipedia format, but I see an easy(?) solution: include the change and make voting for it, where every voter is categorized by some set of ideas and affinities^. Then a reader could see that a specific statement was voted for and against a number of times by people who are after this and that, with some meaningful aggregation. Then very uncommon opinions could be hidden and only seen in 100% mode, except obviously immoral/illegal ones. Another thing to watch for is high community standards, so that heated discussions never make it to the article itself.

A community wiki will always be opinionated and there is no reason to present only one of the sides. And 11-1 is not a sign of anything, because 11 came at their will, but no one was invited to support 1. Maybe it could be 11-5000 if they were. These numbers have no meaning.

^ e.g. centrist, high edu worker, historian.

Interesting idea, but it obviously gives the most power to whomever does the categorization.

BTW, the problem presented in this post is very common, but it's only relevant for less interesting topics (which are most topics). In cases where there are many interested editors involved in a content dispute, Wikipedia RfCs are what's relevant instead, but they too don't work sensibly in practice, see the last paragraph here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236542

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