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.
Indeed. A lot of people seem to thing the options are "discuss in
private" and "discuss in public", and given those options, public
discussion is preferred. 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.