Ilya N. wrote:
The problem, as I've explained before, is there may be one of the following situations:
- Vote tally is (20/0/0) and someone raises a very valid concern that
may make the person unsuitable for adminship.
- Someone raises a concern, vote tally becomes (0/20/0), and then it
turns out it was a sockpuppet doing it.
We want people to only vote once they've gotten the whole picture after discussion.
As an admin, I'd perfer having this instead of relying on a handful of encounters with said user, or having to research 20 users in-depth. As a bureaucrat, it makes it easier to tell whether or not to promote in borderline cases.
Finally, I don't think we should use voting as the main medium for discussion.
I strongly agree. Based on my assessment of our current consensus-determining mechanisms, dividing things into a discussion/fact-finding and voting period will rectify a number of problems. (I'm a regular on [[WP:AFD]] where I close debates, [[WP:FAC]] where I've gotten more than 20 articles featured and [[WP:RFA]].) FAC is effectively one huge fact-finding period, as the culture encourages people to rectify problems as soon as possible and notify the objectors. AfD right now faces the same problem as RFA -- people vote before all the facts are in. If [[WP:PROD]] works, I hope we'll be able to change AfD into something like this -- disputed discussions should have all the facts in before people vote. Right now closing admins have to grimace as they "overrule consensus" because they realise that "Ohnoes, the last voter is right and this article should be kept/deleted, but nobody else has noticed!"
I'm all for this. Let's bring FAC-style discussion to the rest of our consensus-determining mechanisms.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])