[WikiEN-l] Bureaucrats decide!

[Ray Saintonge]

Dycedarg wrote:

>I have a question about this. During the discussion by the bureaucrats, they
>spent the entire time looking at the opposing comments. They analyzed them
>in detail. They then discounted all the ones that they felt shouldn't count
>for various reasons. Then, they proceeded to completely ignore the fact that
>many, possibly even hundreds, of the supporting comments had irrelevant
>reasons or even no reason at all. Here are some of the best examples: "Of
>course", "Yeah, I don't see why not", "seems a no-brainer to me."  So
>basically, they remove all the irrelevant opposes from the equation, then
>leave all the irrelevant supports, and claim that consensus has been reached
>because the opposers' reasoning was faulty. If this isn't supposed to be a
>straw poll, and consensus is deteremined more by quality of arguements and
>not on quantity, then how does this even begin to make sense? Suddenly
>because there a lot of people with faulty or nonexistent reasoning, they
>override a few people who actually provide reasons? Tons of the supporting
>comments treated this as a no brainer. Any action drawing more than 100
>oppose votes on Wikipedia can't possibly be termed a no brainer. The only
>reference to the supporting comments at all that I found was at the
>beginning from Taxman about how "Some comments in both the support and
>opposition sections are certainly not helpful. So far as I see it
>discounting those positions still leads to a nomination below the
>traditional promotion threshhold." There is never any mention of discounting
>any supporting comments at all throughout the rest of the discussion, only
>mentions of throwing out opposes. Could someone please explain how this fits
>common practice, and how I can learn from this when judging where consensus
>is going in the future? Under what circumstances is a decision so "obvious"
>that you can support with no reasoning at all, and then condemn the fairly
>significant opposition for their faulty reasoning and ignore their comments?
>
In other words, it seems that you believe that you favour the side with 
the most windbags.  If this is indeed a "vote" what difference does it 
make if someone does not explain his vote?  If each person who voted 
spent only one minute on the process for this vote alone that's about 
400 minutes or nearly seven hours of time wasted away from doing 
something constructive.  Some windbags spent much more time than that.

Ec