Discussion Vs Consensus

From reading Wiki, I see a pattern emerge. Someone will start a page with an idea to be debated. Many people will comment, and the page grows.

I'm not sure what happens next. Mostly I just see comments made for or against, with no resolution.

One interaction I saw recently was the PlainEnglish discussion. Discussion happened on the PlainEnglish page, and was moved pretty quickly to the PlainEnglishDiscussion? page. That discussion is too young to have reached consensus, but would it be typical to end up with the consensus position represented on the page itself, and all of the discussion used to reach it found on the matching discussion page? This seems like a useful pattern.

If it does happen, I would expect to find topics that could be categorized something like this:

Topics not seeking consensus One page per topic. Maybe many pages with slightly different names.

Consensus seeking topics Unresolved One page per topic. Maybe many pages with slightly different names.

Resolved 2 pages. One with the consensus, and a second with all of the supporting discussion.

Comments?

TentativeSummary sounds like a better idea, as it is simpler. I have seen "Page" and "Page Discussion" pairs lately. Any mechanism to boil down all the discussion would be helpful, in my opinion.

Maybe there could be "Page Summary" or "Page Discussion Summary" pages.

Do you mean that for every topic, there would be a summary page, and a discussion page? That seems to happen some of the time, but in other cases, there is a summary at the top or bottom of a page with lots of discussion. In either case, a TentativeSummary, or even Summary (if possible) is helpful, while the discussion is good to keep so that the discussions don't keep repeating. In other words, the discussion prevents a reinvention of the wheel whenever a topic comes up again, while the summary is an attempt to reduce the discussion down into a consensus opinion

We could be making this too hard. Let's try to keep an idea on one well thought out page. Wiki doesn't promise that absolutely everyone's keystrokes will be kept forever. We don't need the extra space that multiple pages offer.

Agreed. And even though Wiki consensus is a wonderful thing, it is dangerous to force an arbitrary distinction between the consensus and the discussion. The consensus is always open to change, but it will have a harder time changing if the discussion is kept a safe, sterile distance.