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Wikipedia guidelines and policies are often created by a small minority of veteran editors. Very few guidelines and policies are vetted through a voting or consensus process. In fact, veteran editors often discourage voting, stating that it is not necessary.

In most cases, one user simply changes an essay template to a guideline, and if no one disagrees, this essay becomes a guideline. Once this essay becomes guideline, veteran editors then begin to more forcefully exert this guideline on all wikipedia editors.

Examples

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46 editors contributed on the talk page, 28 editors on the main page, before radiant tagged as guideline in February 2006.

34 editors have edited page 342 times since November XX, before this date, there had been no activity since XX XX

Of the 34 editors:

9 of these editors only added a single, one time edit,
4 editors had only two edits.
10 editors had 3 to 7 edits.
5 editors had 10 to 14 edits.
Only 6 editors had 22 to 51 edits, a majority of 63.45 % of the edits

Combining those 11 editors with 10 to 51 edits, those editors were responsible for 80.11% of the edits.

Full Edit history of talk page

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Edits on the talk page since 17 November 2008, (17 November 2008 is when activity started to pick up significantly (number of edits does not reflect the 28 acts of vandalism, and repair on January 14, and two on 8 December 2008)).

Full Graph

Page created on 19:35, 6 August 2006 with section: What about article x? by Daduzi.

10:44, 18 December 2006 JzG (coins?) the "crap articles exist" term, adding the term for the first time to the page.

07:20, 26 January 2007 Wikipedia:Othercrapexists redirect created.

03:35, 7 September 2007 Wikipedia:OTHERCRAPEXISTS redirect created.

Found here: [38]

When the {{unreferenced}} tag was developed, straw poll was held *among the editors who had designed it* about where it should be placed. There were about 30 votes cast (out of a universe of perhaps 10,000 regular editors). These comprised 9 votes for for "top of article page", 10 votes for "bottom of article page", and 13 votes for "talk page". Needless to say, the obvious fourth alternative "nowhere" was not even in the ballot.

So, if that tag is now showing at the top of hundred of thousands of articles, it is because nine editors wanted it there, twenty-three did *not* want it there, and 9,970 editors did not have a chance to give their opinion.

A similar story applies to the Wikipedia:Notability guidelines. I found a straw poll in the Notability talk page about a dozen or so specific questions. The questions were all in jargon (like "PROD" in this RfC) which I was unable to decipher, so presumably only the people who had been involved in the writing of the guidelines voted. There were less than 200 votes, and some of the items in the ballot passed with a tight majority — that is, less than 1% of the pool of active editors. Unfortunately I could not determine whether the final declared "consensus" honored these votes, or — as in the case of the {{unreferenced}} tag — the minority opinion prevailedanyway.

See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ Radiant had tagged this a guideline for the first time the day before