One of the Nine Theses on Wikipedia series.

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1. End decision-making by “consensus.”

Wikipedia’s policy of deciding editorial disputes by working toward a “consensus” position is absurd. Its notion of “consensus” is an institutional fiction, supported because it hides legitimate dissent under a false veneer of unanimity. Perhaps the goal of consensus was appropriate when the community was small. But before long, the participant pool grew so large that true consensus became impossible. In time, ideologues and paid lackeys began to declare themselves to be the voice of the consensus, using this convenient fiction to marginalize their opponents. This sham now serves to silence dissent and consolidate power, and it is wholly contrary to the founding ideal of a project devoted to bringing humanity together. Wikipedia must repudiate decision-making by consensus once and for all.

Note: The first four theses all concern different aspects of neutrality. This involves some repetition and expansion of analysis, because the issues involved are so central and important.

The Problem

When Wikipedia launched, we borrowed a principle from the original wikis of the 1990s: Wikipedia articles would represent a “consensus view.”¹

A consensus is, of course, a position that everyone can agree to. Not on Wikipedia, [a] though. On Wikipedia, an article that is completely one-sided and quite controversial is often declared—with furrowed-brow seriousness—to represent the community “consensus.” If this sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. As someone who was there at the beginning, I can tell you that this is not Wikipedia’s original notion of consensus.

But a consensus view was not a single view of a controversy. It was a frank admission that there were multiple, competing views; it was an exploration of the “lay of the land” that all could agree upon. Indeed, our original practice of representing multiple views fairly was why decision-making by consensus could be made policy in the first place. We, full of the foolish idealism of youth, imagined that motivated ideologues could be taught to write neutrally, all coming together to make the text express all relevant possibilities. The rule was simple: When we disagree, we should not fight over whose views should be stated by the article. Rather, we attribute our own views to their best representatives, and we allow others to do the same with theirs. In this way, we thought, we could avoid hashing out controversies and focus on recording facts. The practice of neutrality was a framework in which we could work toward a “consensus text.” The consensus was not about the facts, but about how a neutral exploration of the debate should read. This was the original understanding of consensus—but now it is long forgotten. Of course we could not agree on the facts. What we could agree upon was a text that represented many different views of the facts side-by-side.

But that was, as I said, foolishly idealistic. We never made proper allowances for the harsh reality that there would be truly intractable disagreements, even among people who say they agree with the framework of neutrality—some people simply refuse to let others have their say at all, or not in any fair way. This became obvious even in the first year of the project, which cooled me on the very idea of “consensus” as a method of conflict-resolution.

Then, surely, the naïve idea of decision-making by consensus was dropped. Right?

Wrong. Instead, after I left, Wikipedia became increasingly strange and insular, and the notion of “consensus” was actually twisted into its opposite. Today, the new reality is admitted frankly: [a]

Consensus on Wikipedia does not require unanimity (which is ideal but rarely achievable), nor is it the result of a vote.

…

When editors do not reach agreement by editing, discussion on the associated talk pages continues the process toward consensus.

A consensus decision takes into account all of the proper concerns raised. Ideally, it arrives with an absence of objections, but often, we must settle for as wide an agreement as can be reached. When there is no wide agreement, consensus-building involves adapting the proposal to bring in dissenters without losing those who accepted the initial proposal.

Long gone is any suggestion that neutrality is a framework that permits a true consensus to be achieved. We early Wikipedians find this sad. Let us analyze what has changed, in terms of the goal, the process, and the community.

(1) The goal has changed; pluralistic expression of different viewpoints is not specifically preferred. Gone is any notion that consensus involves laying out a plurality of viewpoints in a coherent and balanced way. In fact, sometimes, when people attempt to explore various competing views in an article, this is rejected—wrong-headedly, I believe—as a “synthesis of published material,” and thus original research.² When there is conflict, positions often harden. Rather than allowing multiple views to emerge, the “community” winds up selecting one view, or a few leading views, and calling that “the consensus.”

(2) The method of reaching “consensus” has also changed; real negotiation among equals has largely disappeared, regardless of what the guidelines say. Gone is the practice of friendly negotiation toward agreement or collaborating in flat, self-managing groups, usually without administrative interference. In its place are fiat judgments made by insiders, sometimes preceded by the adversarial process of pushing the issue through a complex dispute resolution bureaucracy. The end result of this often abusive process is cynically dubbed “the consensus.”

The aim of the winning side, all too often, is to exclude ideological opponents. Thus, the consensus is engineered: one side’s arguments are declared by an editorial bureaucracy to fit well with an alphabet soup of acronym-laden policies, guidelines, and “essays.” This determination ultimately turns on which side boasts the most senior editors and administrators. Sometimes, the true heavies³ are called in, who rule peremptorily, as if they were high-ranking commissars settling matters between underlings. The Wikipedians themselves now rightly mock such displays of power, [a] but without stopping the charade.

(3) And the community has changed—perhaps saddest of all, for those who remember the early days. A truly polite, collegial atmosphere has largely disappeared. I warned [a] Wikipedians when I left to be “open and warmly welcoming, not insular.” They did not take my advice. Long gone is the sincere, friendly collegiality of people who really are committed to synthesizing diverse viewpoints into a single cohesive document. In its place is the ill-will begotten of an adversarial game in which bureaucratic types face off, calling out every minor infraction and citing acronyms at each other. No wonder friendly, decent people are so often driven away by the sheer hostility of the Wikipedia “community.”⁴

The plain fact is that Wikipedian “consensus” is no consensus at all. That is the elephant in the room. I am pointing right at it. One is hard pressed to know what precisely to call the current decision-making process. Wikipedians deserve ridicule if they continue calling it “consensus.” That is an institutional fiction, and a darkly cynical one.

The Reasonable Solution

To begin, stop calling your process “consensus.” At least rename it. As to what description replaces it, this is important, but I leave that to the Wikipedians.⁵

I will also abstain from proposing a different decision-making process. Mainly I am saying that this institutional fiction must, for the sake of honesty, be dropped. I will say this, however. Anyone who has the honesty to admit that “consensus” was an impossible fiction all along should also be able to see that there is a need for some reform in how editorial disputes are resolved. The fiction itself plays a role in the Wikipedia game: it cynically papers over what is, in fact, the raw exercise of power. Yet, since the description of the existing process as “consensus” is official policy, it might be changed only through strong leadership within the community or imposition by the Wikimedia Board.

For those Wikipedians who are willing to try to think through the difficult issues involved in fair community decision-making, let me suggest just a few possible ideas:

1. Create an open editorial committee of persons known to be uniquely identified (if not known publicly), so that there is always one person, one vote. Controversies are settled by a vote of some randomly selected subset of the committee, who can escalate important issues upward.
2. As a variant on the foregoing, weight the votes in the same way that X.com does with its “Community Notes.”
3. Those who submit a dispute to some deciding agency must precisely identify the issue on which the users disagree. They must spend at least 24 hours attempting to arrive at consensus on at least what the issue is that they disagree about.

If Wikipedia neither changes its decision-making practice nor changes the description of its practice as “consensus,” it is clear that their editorial process has lost all credibility. The bickering baboons of bias will continue to fight among themselves until the most powerful emerges. Oblivious to the high comedy of it all, Wikipedia’s self-appointed deciders congratulate themselves on being the voice of the “consensus”—of all who think exactly as they do.

One of the Nine Theses on Wikipedia series

Footnotes

1. The internet history wonks might want to dig into the original wiki, WikiWikiWeb, [a] founded by Ward Cunningham. In particular, see WikiWikiWeb’s discussion of “DocumentMode,” [a] which is very roughly like an encyclopedia article. On this and similar early wikis, the community would build pages collaboratively, first talking things out in “ThreadMode,” [a] as in a discussion thread. Then, when a “consensus” was reached—and this was the word used, as in “rough consensus and running code”—somebody would go in and “refactor” (another term borrowed from computer programming) the page into something more like a document and less like a conversation. Then, the page would be in DocumentMode. Note that WikiWikiWeb looked askance at “Phony Community Consensus” (see the section of this page. [a]) It was not cool to pretend there was a consensus when there wasn’t one.[↩]
2. See WP:SYNTH. [a] To be clear, this is contrary to the policy page, even as it is now stated. Such an offending “synthesis” is supposed to be an actual new inference; but sometimes, simply enumerating a series of views is wrongly misrepresented as such a “synthesis.”[↩]
3. Such as those discussed in Thesis 6, or just any editor with a long history and high number of edits.[↩]
4. See, for example, Ashley Rindsberg, “Wikipedia Editors Are in Open Revolt over the American Pope,” [a] Pirate Wires, May 9, 2025. It seems there have been chaotic, petty disputes on the “Pope Leo XIV” [a] article’s Talk page over simple biographical facts: Is Pope Leo “American”? Peruvian? Black? Wikipedia’s once-collegial spirit has certainly given way to adversarial point‑scoring. How on earth can Wikipedia say with a straight face that any resolution to such interminable wrangling represents a “consensus”?[↩]
5. Here are some words that more honestly describe the result of the currently broken process: prevailing outcome, established outcome, editorial resolution, settled version, dominant opinion, final judgment.[↩]