Wikipedia talk:Consensus/pragmatic concessions

Some pragmatic concessions

 * "Consensus (b): the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned." - http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/consensus

Consensus is often defined as the (unanimous) consent of everyone. However, in the day to day process of editing wikipedia, it is very hard to obtain perfect unanimity. Also, it is very hard to determine if everyone who needs to be heard is actually heard. Therefore, on wikipedia, we partially lift the requirement for consensus to find what people call Rough Consensus.


 * If a decision cannot be made entirely unanimously, sometimes a small minority may simply need to agree to disagree. This is not a common occurrence, but it does occur.
 * The criterion for consensus is reversed: Instead of everyone must agree, the criterion is nobody must disagree. If none disagree with an action, then that action will be taken. This is the root of our advice to be BOLD in editing. If anyone disagrees, they will revert the actions of the bold editor.
 * Consensus is only established between people who are actually present at a certain page at the time.
 * To counteract the time bias of the above three rules, it is taken as a given that Consensus Can Change at any time. If an editor disagrees with something that happened at any time in the past, they can bring it up in discussion or be bold and try to change it directly. Note that if it is known that consensus is likely to be against something, it might not be a good idea to try to go against it all at once, even though doing so is permitted, if an editor is sure of themselves.
 * The current consensus on an issue typically consists on the web of agreements and understandings between individual editors. Because everyone is a volunteer, they may or may not take the time to document the current state of consensus on any particular issue, as they see fit. So take into account the fact that a consensus on an issue can exist, without there being any documentation on the issue. Conversely, existing documentation might be superseded by actual consensus, and be in an incorrect state. We do encourage people to maintain documentation on the current consensus, and the documentation is typically fairly well maintained, but do be aware that a wiki can never be 100% reliable, and do check everything you read for yourself, as is true of all other namespaces.