"to sort out expressions of community consensus and response to them."
- If this case is accepted for that reason, I think some things should be kept in mind:
- The standard forms of generating consensus have traditionally been the AfD (where most votes/statements come from uninvolved parties browsing the list), and consensus on talk pages involving the contributors to articles. Centralized discussions seem to achieve the consensus of a basically different group (I came into the issue via -Ril-'s advertisements on Bible-cruft, as did probably many other participants).
- The limited consensus in the case of the Matthew discussion was often driven by assertions that (as Radiant put in in the intro to the Matthew discussion), "merging does not lose content, it simply organizes content." The language of "merge" was taken as a mandate to redirect verse articles to Matthew 1, etc., which remained unchanged (not merged in any meaningful sense).
- What role should a consensus in what is typically a policy domain (AfD, centralized discussions, etc.) play in dictating disputed article content? Are contributors free to use common sense and/or WP:IAR to interpret policy such as "no primary sources", or is the intervention of non-contributors valid since it is to some extent a question of policy interpretation? There is no question that the topic of Matthew 1 is encyclopedic; should AfD-style polls take precedence over the active contributors to a valid article? I don't know the answers to these questions, but maybe that's just because I haven't spent enough time in policy discussions.--ragesoss 14:34, 28 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This strongly needs to be addressed. I believe that SimonP's approach to these Bible verse/chapter articles has been unhelpful, for many of the reasons -Ril- cites and others. Every time one or another verse comes up under VfD, there is a solid consensus that these articles are unacceptable, but in the end a few people end up blocking consensus on technicalities on most but not all of the proposals, which end up dying. WP currently does not have a good mechanism for dealing with whole batches of similar articles like these Bible verses which present the same issues over and over. Thus it would seem to be a good candidate for arbitration, if anyone on the committee can actually do something about it. NTK 06:59, 3 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]