So the strongest action gets supported even though I think more people voted for no action or a weaker form of action. (It would need checking to see exactly how many people appeared in each column.) It also did not reach Wikipedia's normal standards for a concensus. It all reminds me of one of my most extreme encounters with shamocracy.
Way back around the time that the median Wikipedian was being born, Margaret Thatcher had won her third "landslide" election victory (42.2% of votes cast <32% of total electorate). At this point she had started to believe in her political immortality and was becoming increasingly dotty believing that she could introduce anything she wanted. She decided to change local taxation from a property tax to a poll tax.
I joined my local anti-poll tax group. We agreed that we would not be politically alligned and that no political group should distribute their literature from our stall. However, one evening we (or at least that small fraction of the group who bothered to attend weekly meetings) turned up at our meeting to see hordes of people we had never seen before. They voted for us to affiliate to the area anti-poll tax federation which in turn was affiliated to a national federation all of whose leaders belonged to the Militant Tendency, a group which was also in the news around that time for its entryist tactics attempting to take control of the Labour Party. They also elected a representative to the area federation who was not involved in doing any of the real donkey and received no votes from the regular members. He soon started trying to sell Militant from our anti-poll tax stall but his backers never appeared again at another of our meetings and we told him where to go.
The poll tax proved to be Thatcher's downfall. It took rather longer for Tommy Sheridan, the head of the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation to eventually get his comeuppance and be jailed for three years for perjury. I haven't a clue what happenned to the non-entity who was our local delegate to the federation, presumably he just disappeared back under a stone somewhere.
In the current situation we have a combination of Jimbo having the same self-belief of Thatcher, Blair, Gaddhaffi and other autocrats who have been in office for too long, with vote flooding by outside activists and with the vast majority of regular Wikipedians not taking part in the vote. The action is portrayed in the news (at least the BBC which I have on) as being by "Wikipedia". In reality it is by an autocrat, a few of his hangers-on and a load of outsiders. The majority of Wikipedians have not expressed their views and no one can know whether they back the action or not.
This post has been edited by Eppur si muove:
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