Larry Sanger

Here, the idea is that Wikipedians have this unfortunate practice of pretending that after a topic has been discussed enough, when they have arrived at a decision, that that should be dubbed the consensus view.

Right.

when often it's not.

One side is the loser, the other side is the winner.

And if they're just taking the winning side, that doesn't make the winning side the consensus view.

So all I'm saying there is that in the interest of neutrality,

stop calling this decision-making procedure consensus because that's not what it is.

Well, well,

Oh, let's see.

I know there's probably many examples, but I find examples are helpful to make it concrete.

Essentially, whenever Wikipedia has a debate on any topic at all, it goes through a process of sort of discussion.

Sometimes there's dispute resolution and so forth.

And often what happens at some point is there's a kind of vote-taking issue

It's not supposed to be democratic.

They say it's not democratic, but to that extent, it is.

They don't necessarily tally the vote, but usually the vote is strongly on one side or the other.

And when it is...

then they say that's the consensus.

Sometimes, though, when there is such vote-taking, some administrator or just very distinguished, you know...

long-lasting uh wikipedia editor steps in and and overrules the whole procedure and says yes this is not in keeping with our policy obviously and so i'm just going to shut this down that they do that sort of thing quite a bit just ending discussions um including ending um these sorts of