How does one determine the "consensus view"?

Question

Where there are questions about the Community's 'consensus' view (many of which relate to tagging as the tag most often applied on meta TSE in conjunction with discussion) users may refer to decisions to be taken or that have been or should be taken on meta TSE.

The outcome of such "discussion" is often not clear. The average number of views for such questions is 105 (we have over 35,000 users and a single question with over 250,000 views, on TSE main). Of the 135 questions on meta tagged tagging, only 52 show as Answered, and a green tick is hardly definitive in the circumstances since its application is the exclusive prerogative of just the one user who posted the question.

A more reliable indication of what passes for a consensus may be the pink (moderator-only) tags. These seem to include at least:

status-completed 49
status-bydesign 10
status-declined 5
community-ads 4
featured 2
faq 2
status-norepro 2
status-deferred 0
status-planned 0
status-reproduced 0
status-review 0

However these are still not reliable since not applied consistently (and, it seems, there is no way to select all pink tags as a group). For example backpack seems to have been renamed backpacks more than three years ago (see 43 views but has no pink tag, nor Accepted answer).

Another way is as chosen for some "MegaQuestions", for example the current September 2016 Tag Rename & Synonym MegaQuestion. Here both 'completed' and 'planned' are combined together with, at times 'declined' (at least temporarily). This seems useful in indicating whatever patterns there might be (for example singular to plural renames) but is not so helpful when earlier versions (eg Summer Tag Rename 2016 and Summer Tag Rename 2015 do not have pink tags, and the former no Accept either).

How does one determine the "consensus view" given the above and, for example, the following?:

Usefulness of “sightseeing” et al – 5 years old, 56 views, no Accepted A, no pink tag, 7 A votes.

Should we consider having tags for individual airlines? - 5 years old, 128 views, no Accepted A, no pink tag, 17 A votes.

Tag descriptions - 5 years old, 47 views, no Accepted A, no pink tag, 8 A votes, and in part wildly out of date (though in part still relevant).

2011 EVENT - Sorting out tags, wiki excerpts - 5 years old, 92 views, no A, no pink tag and wildly out of date.

Help please with tag [self-guided] – only 5 days old, 23 views, no A, no pink tag. 2 Comments but nothing conclusive (more "something should be done" than "this is what should be done").

Which tags and tag groups need attention (where several synonyms or the synonyms do not cover all they should)? – 8 months old, 61 views, no Accepted A, no pink tag, 2 A votes.

Merge “left-luggage” and “luggage-storage” tags – 7 months old, 105 views, no Accepted A, no pink tag, 7 A votes.

And so on.

Of the above the maximum number of Answer votes is 17 - spread across four Answers and a mix of up and down, so possibly just 7 voted there out of our 35,000+ users.

There are 14 Qs tagged tagging with status-completed tags.

Answer 1

In an ideal world, each discussion on Meta should either:

1. Have a strong consensus from all the community members, so the answer is "obvious".
2. If the matter is disputed (or no user comes forward with a highly-upvoted answer), a mod must post his own answer and given answer would be binding until said otherwise by another mod. Kind of like the Supreme Court works in the US.

An example of scenario #1 is: What is a good tag for the "where in the world can I" questions?

An example of scenario #2 is: The tag [rationale] has no rationale

However for some reason the current mods prefer not to get involved in most disputes, so the consensus is sometimes left in the air. Hopefully this can change post-election.

Answer 2

I think voting on Meta is the way to go. We poll all registered users. We feature the post on the home page. Everyone can vote. Whomever doesn't vote is exerting the right to not express their opinion and there's nothing we can do about it. We leave two weeks to gather consensus. The answer with the highest number of votes wins, regardless of the number of gathered votes.

Basically we do like SE does for mod elections. This, I think, is democracy.