Forum:Omitting the voting procedure and clarifying consensus in RfA/RfBs

So with regards to the confusion over how consensus is interpreted with RfA and RfB, I feel a modest change to the system would help us overcome this and make things more clear.

I'd like to propose that we omit the voting procedure that takes place with RfA and RfB if consensus isn't clear from the discussion. From what I remember, the voting procedure was primarily implemented as a compromise to us needing the system yet the community didn't quite want to do away with voting completely. The discussion-based system has been mostly successful for us and determining whether or not a nomination needs to progress to a vote is often rather confusing and frankly the vote itself doesn't really make things any clearer.

With this, I'd like for us to clarify that consensus in these discussions is meant to be a general agreement on promoting a user and that a rough consensus of two-thirds (66%) is needed for a promotion to take place. This eliminates the situation of one being confused as into whether or not there is a consensus as it would be a case of either there is a favourable consensus to promote the nominee, in which case the RfA/RfB is successful, or there isn't and therefore it's unsuccessful, so we wouldn't have to worry about things being split 50/50 or whatever.

While it may seem like I'm looking for the easy way out, I feel this move would solve a lot of the confusion regarding RfX consensus and would ultimately make the process a lot clearer.

Note that I'm not proposing we close down RfA/RfB while we discuss this, as this isn't a major overhaul, but any RfAs or RfBs that take place while this is being discussed should use the current system as it stands.

Please discuss below. 13:39, February 5, 2014 (UTC)