Wikipedia:Consensus defined

This is a failed proposal. Consensus for its implementation was not established within a reasonable period of time. If you want to revive discussion, please use the talk page or initiate a thread at the village pump.

This proposed policy in a nutshell: Eliminate the nebulosity and extreme administrator discretion in deciding what consensus is. Create a systematic method of determining whether consensus has been reached, as opposed to ad-hoc methods.

Consensus. One of the most widely used terms on Wikipedia, and one of its bedrock principles. Astonishingly for such a basic procedural policy of the encyclopedia, by which all decisions are guided, nobody knows its true definition, for the simple reason that there have been no attempts to identify what consensus actually is. The lack of such a definition means that the use of consensus to determine whether a specific action should be performed is nearly worthless. The word can mean so many things that it can often be used - and abused - in order for an entity on Wikipedia to meet its ends.

For these reasons, the definition of consensus on this encyclopedia should be codified as a policy. It is obvious that consensus should not be changed to a simple majority or a given percentage of individuals in support of a particular action. Rather, a subsection should be inserted under the "Determining consensus" section of WP:CONS to include this definition. The text shall be as follows: