From: Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com
Consensus is a fantastic method for governance when the decision is something with directly effects everyone... it is perhaps the only method for governance where it is possible to act without ethical compromises.
However consensus only achieves that level of fairness when inaction is less harmful than action.
Which is clearly the case, given that there are no real problems with the existing situation, and 500 admins and growing to take care of admin duties.
In the case of those adminships, there was no consensus to admin but there was also no consensus to fail to admin. Because adminship is no big deal, and because the natural state of a longtime and trustworthy user should be as an admin, it would be reasonable to argue that the correct result of a no consensus adminship should be adminning.
Exactly. And the people who are denied adminship are generally either not longterm or not trustworthy. Of course there will be exceptions to this, but these are few and far between. If we radically re-vamp existing processes with very low error rates in an attempt to achieve perfection, we are fooling ourselves; no process is perfect, none will ever be, and the likelihood that a new process will achieve fewer errors is low.
The adminships I cited were not just random failures:
There's no evidence they were "failures" at all.
In each of the cited the reasons given by the oppose were cited by a fair number of the supporters as not reasons to oppose. In each of the cases the support community contained a group of wikipedians at least as well respected and as experienced as users in the opposed camp.
i.e. There was no consensus.
By failing to act on these adminships we have done a great disservice to the Wikipedia community.
This is simply hyperbole.
Short of actually being adminned, these users will have no way of proving themselves. (that much is clear, at least one of them had a failed prior adminship due to real issues and put in an additional year of hard work before someone renominated).
The community changes and evolves; there are many cases of people who failed at amin nominations the first time, only to be accepted the second time, so there is clearly no systemic issue here. Rather, these individual cases raised specific and individual concerns that had not been adequately dealt with at the time of nomination.
The complex popularity game that it takes to become an admin turns adminship into something it should not be, a big deal... and it is our duty to tack action to fix that.
No, it turns it into what it should be; a process for ensuring that admins are trusted by the community and created by consensus. There is no duty to take action to fix something that it not broken; on the contrary, it is our duty to ensure that working processes are not damaged by those seeking solutions to non-existent problems which will not improve Wikipedia as an encyclopedia.
Jay.