On 12/11/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/12/2007, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
And we are unfortunate in another respect: due to a misunderstanding of what has happened here, we may see a decline in admins having private conversations with friends to "sanity check" things, and we may see a decline in thoughtfully coordinated on-wiki actions. And that's a
shame.
However, the issue arises in cases where public discussion isn't an option at all for whatever reason, so the actual options are "discuss in private" and "don't discuss at all and act unilaterally". Given those options, private discussions are obviously a good thing.
If the person acts unilaterally they know that that it is their reputation on the line and theirs alone. In addition there is no real way they can mentally partition themselves from their actions. We know that people are prepared to go further when they think there is some kind of authority that will support them. There is a risk that people people will view the group as such an authority. through in the problem of such groups tending to be selectable and things are only going to get worse.
If you are going to consult privately it is probably best done with a group you have little control over the membership of (say select 10 admins at random from the admin list).
This to my mind is very close to the heart of the matter. Here is where we could begin to seek for constructive ways to improve our best practises.
Clearly if the argument in favour of private lists hangs in any significant degree on the possibility that people on such private lists would say to someone who posted evidentially insufficient cause for a blocking action: "Hey, are you smoking crack, or what? There is nothing but circumstantial evidence there!" (In a much kinder phrasing of course.); we have to ask, why did this not happen in the case which caused the outcry. It might be nice to know if there frequently *did* happen this kind of friendly intervention where somebody was in danger of overstepping the mark.
But indeed these questions are insufficient. The constructive way forward is indeed to think of ways where a "sanity check" would be more likely to catch such human failings, *before* the mistaken action.
One can think a useful mechanism would be, if somebody who was on the brink of a blocking action, could post their cause (evidence, and their interpretation of it) anonymously to a random group of admins with proven experience of such matters, and they would give their reactions back also anonymously. In my view the double anonymity would to a large part remove the silly tendency of people to evaluate things ad hominem, and *force* people to confront the facts as they are.
-- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]