Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-09-30/Opinion

Opinion

Are we ever going to reach consensus?

No consensus?

Wikipedia has lots to explore, especially for editors. When I was only a reader of Wikipedia, I would just look at the information and not really bother to look further. Now as an editor, I've found that there is so much to be discovered, like Wikiprojects and the Teahouse. But I had never wondered what would happen if an article had to be deleted. In fact, I'd thought all articles were perfect — Featured Article status – so they would never have to be deleted. Articles for deletion has so much to discover. Most of the time, it's only a few people participating, but sometimes, it can turn into a long line of comments and opinions...

So, what happened?

I was just scrolling one day to find some Articles for Deletion discussion pages when I came across a discussion for the article on the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev. Now, when I first saw the title of the article, I was a bit skeptical. What's an important topic doing at AfD? Then I started to read the nominator's argument, and I looked at the article itself, and so I said to myself: wait a minute, they actually had a good reason for nominating this! There were quite a few opinions there already on what to do, more than I normally saw, so I decided I should have a voice. After making my decision on what to do, I had my say.

Anyway, I like to check up on the discussion after I !vote on an Articles for Deletion discussion. When I clicked the page, here's what I found:

There were so many !votes!

This continued for the next couple of days. More !votes, and more, and more. Eventually the discussion closed, with the result being "no consensus." I didn't think there was going to be any, anyway. I checked recently, and the article is like this now.

But why did this take so many !votes?

Most articles for deletion discussions aren't like this. They have a couple of !votes, and that's it. Like this one:

Then some are longer.. but not super long like the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev article.

Some are really, really long!

This deletion discussion is also super long, and I found this one while I was writing this article. It's from when the talk page at WikiProject User Rehab got nominated for deletion. (Which is kind of ironic, because actually I'm a participant in Wikiproject User Rehab, so if this had been deleted then I could have never joined.) The final result to this discussion was "no consensus."

But you've already seen the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev article, and you too saw that it had also reached no consensus. Why did these two not reach consensus? I think it has to do with the amount of !votes. Coming to an agreement is really hard when you have so many people voicing their opinions. It's a bit like having a speech and debate contest- except for one person against another there are fifty people on each side. Would it be hard then for the judge (in Wikipedia's case, an administrator), to decide what to do? Yes. That might be why we don't reach consensus with these Article for Deletion discussions... but why do so many !votes get there in the first place? I think the reason why some Articles for Deletion discussions have lots and lots of !votes is because the article nominated for deletion gets lots of views— like a newsworthy item. We can kind of come up with a rule of thumb:

The more views an article that is nominated for deletion gets, the more !votes it will get on its deletion discussion page.

Obviously the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev was a newsworthy event, so the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev article got a lot of views, which led to a lot of !votes. But even though these discussions get a lot of !votes, your !vote still counts. So !vote. If you're an administrator, all I can say in these scenarios is— you're going to be scrolling down for quite a while! Thank you.

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30 September 2022 (all comments)

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Um. Not to be mean, but is there any point to this other than the author realizing that long discussions are harder to summarize? I may be missing the message somewhere. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 08:11, 1 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

There's nothing to miss. He's making a very valid point which some readers might not have considered or need reminding what hard work closing some AfD is. The backlog is full of ones nobody wants to touch. Sometimes I would spend an hour or more trying to reach a conclusion and I usually did, but I don't close AfD any more, for good reason. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:48, 1 October 2022 (UTC) .[reply]

I'm not so sure the !vote count necessarily is related to page views as much as related to how many editors have an article on watch. The way our AfD process is set up, if there is no clear consensus for deletion then by default the discussion is closed as "keep". As one example I saw this in an AfD for a corporate CEO biography which (to me) appeared to have greatly exaggerated passing mentions and was full of vanity sources of questionable editorial oversight. His cavalry had already rode in for the rescue. Several editors, whose history suggested that bios are their line of work, came to its defense and bludgeoned the "delete" votes. And, with no clear "delete" consensus, the article remained. Sometimes these decisions are in the eye of the closing administrator. When there's a wall of text the path of least resistance is to just close as "no consensus" so as not to deal with yet more discussion at deletion review and/or talk page "Why did you do this?" pleas. Blue Riband► 13:00, 1 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
A different possible conclusion is you are likely to have a short discussion when consensus is within reach. You may still have a lot of editors see the discussion for a popular topic but don't bother to comment because they agree with the already evident consensus. A discussion may get closed before it gets too long due to WP:SNOW. You see long discussions for borderline situations where you were headed towards no consensus from the start. I actually wish administrators would try to recognize and close these non-converging discussions earlier. Avoiding long AfD discussions would conserve a lot of community goodwill. ~Kvng (talk) 22:18, 1 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Relevant graph from the golden age of battles between deletionists and inclusionists: https://notabilia.net/ Altamel (talk) 04:24, 3 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Altamel: Daaaaamn! There's some craziness there for sure. The one that really stuck out to me, though, wasn't because of the length of the discussion. No, the impressive thing to me is that the article (and some may find this title offensive, so I'll poor-man's spoiler-tag it by using white text on a white background, select if you want to be able to read it — if my text-color shenanigans fail you and the text is visible anyway, just know that I'm lusciously sorry) ...the article "Gay Nigger Association of America" bit the dust after a long discussion on its EIGHTEENTH nomination! FeRDNYC (talk) 07:16, 9 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I intensely dislike the shorthand "!vote" to mean, "we don't vote." That's not what registers in the brain, and based on the content of many of these purportedly consensus-driven discussions, many editors in fact do believe that voting is what's happening. Shorthand that fails to summarize a complicated concept should not be used.~T P W 17:26, 3 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@True Pagan Warrior, do you have a suggestion? ~Kvng (talk) 13:38, 4 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I think this is one of those cases in which using all the words is just better. "I shared my views" might be one appropriate phrase. Given that we don't have practical limits to the number of characters we write, and the shorthand saves only a second or two in most cases, taking the time to use words is a better option. It not only minimizes misunderstanding, it helps chip away at the ever-increasing barriers to editing. ~T P W 14:35, 4 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@True Pagan Warrior: {{citation needed}} on the ever-increasing barriers to editing, BTW. I mean, this is a time when Wikipedia has gained not only the Visual Editor, but also the companion TemplateData system that attempts make the process of inserting template transclusions far more guided and intuitive (or at least, intuit-able). I'm not disputing that there are still barriers to editing, but if they're increasing then something is clearly wrong. FeRDNYC (talk) 21:30, 8 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@True Pagan Warrior: The shorthand, if we're being literal, is technically "not-vote". "!" is a common syntax for negation (used in algebraic notations and some programming languages). When discussing someone's contribution to a consensus discussion, what you're discussing is not a vote (though it looks like one) — hence, not-vote, or !vote for (too?-)short.

On one hand, as the Wikipedia community has grown and become less skewed towards the technically-minded, that association — and therefore the "obvious" common interpretation of the shorthand it would invoke — has probably become increasingly obscure and inaccessible to a greater percentage of the intended audience. I can see that argument.

On the other hand, the fact that consensus discussions aren't votes is something new editors often struggle with on philosophical grounds, more than technical or definitional ones. They tend to duck-type the discussions: If it walks like a vote and talks like a vote, they assume it must be a voting process. I'm not convinced it's the "!vote" shorthand that causes that confusion, nor am I convinced their (mis-)understanding would substantially change simply because we stopped using the term "!vote". (Though, as I said on the first hand, there may be reasons it should be abandoned anyway.) FeRDNYC (talk) 21:22, 8 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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