Fastfission wrote:
Let's not use the very subjective term "annoyed" and instead consider it as a fact-finding exercise. The question is, if more than one admin has found a user to have done something wrong, does that make it likely that they have done something wrong?
Yes, I do not deny that. Now -- if a user finds an admin to have done something wrong, does that make it likely that the admin has done something wrong? Obviously you'll say 'no' because there's only one user complaining, and everyone else sides with the admin. But read on...
If the admins in question get no obvious benefit out of agreeing with one another (i.e. they are not conspiring), then this is a statement about the ability of independent assessments by people who are classified as being "known to be reliable" to arrive at something like the truth.
But we have already established on this mailing list that admins *do* conspire, albeit on a very subtle and subconscious level, without knowing it. Someone (not me!) gave this analogy with noblemen in the Middle Ages, who rarely if ever accused each other of a crime even if they knew about such a crime. If an ordinary citizen were to accuse a nobleman of anything, all the noblemen (who were "known to be reliable" and supposedly had "ability of independent assessments") would side with their fellow nobleman and all come to the same conclusion in his favour.
It is within human nature to perceive agreeing with members of one's own social class as beneficial, and to make it harder for "lower humans" who disagree with them to enter their class. Now, why is this the case? Read on...
The question is whether the complaints are valid. Sometimes they are. Often they are not. We need to take care to differentiate between the two, which I generally do on the basis of whether or not admin opinions have been completely one-sided.
A-ha! Doesn't this explain the above effect then? If a majority of admins agree with a decision, then the decision is less likely to be questioned (and, consequently, the complaining user is taken less seriously). Therefore, admins will agree with each other in order to reduce the likelihood of being questioned. This is the "benefit of agreeing with each other" that you were looking for. :)
If all admins come to more-or-less the same conclusion, then the likelihood is the complaint is "not valid" (which can mean a number of things, usually "is not resonant with the way things are done on Wikipedia", which is a relatively non-normative way of putting it).
Now, does "the way things are done on Wikipedia" refer to the spirit of the policies, or the behaviour of admins in practice? We all know that there are significant differences between those two.
If you mean "the spirit of the policies", then I disagree with you: admins can very easily come to the conclusion that one of their fellow admins "did okay" when a more impartial observer (which in reality doesn't exist) would say the action was clearly beyond the borderline set out by the policy. Especially when that action becomes more and more common, more and more admins get away with it, and thus it becomes more and more accepted.
If you mean "the way admins behave in practice", then you have confirmed my theory. Several admins come to the same conclusion, /therefore/ you do the same (and presumably accept and defend their arguments but not the complaining user's).
The complaining users have already done that numerous times. All of that evidence is usually brushed under the rug, and the topic changed to collecting evidence of that user's own wrong-doing (the "tu quoque" fallacy). I get the impression that the percentage of people on this mailing list who take any of those evidence-presenting complaints seriously is alarmingly low.
I try to take them seriously, but most of the time it becomes abundantly clear that the complaining user is, at best, trying to use technicalities of rules to game the system, or has absolutely no regard for any of our core policies.
Such as?
Of course it is easy for you to claim that someone has "absolutely no regard for policy XYZ", but surely most of the time it is more likely a misunderstanding of the spirit of the policy (by either side!), or just complete ignorance of a less obvious policy. It is, for example, not intuitive that we should have a policy on "notability" or "verifiability", so why should anyone look that up?
Again, I think complaints should be evaluated seriously, and admins should not uncritically leap to the defense of other admins, but I don't find your argument as stated very compelling.
Not very but at least a little? ;-)
Timwi