"Wales is a country.."
The conclusion is of this discussion/debate was that Wales is commonly described as a "country", and can therefore be described as such on Wikipedia. The consensus in the final poll was to use the word country in the first line of the introduction, pipe-linked to an explanatory article (currently Countries of the United Kingdom).
The complete discussion/debate of this period in Wales Talk is collected together on this archive page for reference.
Countries of the United Kingdom provides 72 individual reliable sources that directly refer to Wales as a "country" without any qualifying explanation or words like constituent. It also provides 72 such references for England, Northern Ireland and Scotland. The shortcut to the reference tables is UKCOUNTRYREFS.
Note: The contributor Pureditor was later found out to be a sock puppet of a persistent offender, and has been indefinitely blocked.