----- Original Message ---- From: John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com
Well, once you consider that many people opposed Danny for enforcing policy,
not explaining why he resigned his adminship, etc., and take them out of the equation, it's pretty apparent that the numbers are in the room to promote for 'crats - and that's assuming we want the 'crats to behave as cold, calculating machines and adhere to those silly strict numbers rules we've come up with.<<
If someone can oppose because a user is too young, doesn't have 10,000 edits, hasn't written an article that has been promoted to FA, why aren't these valid reasons to oppose. It seems as if the oppose votes weren't plagued by sockpuppets and they were valid users voting to oppose. I agree with someone's comments on one of the discussions that there is an obvious sign of favoritism when Danny gets promoted at 68% but other people don't. There seems to be a strong agreement by the community and by the bureaucrats in previous discussions that 70% is the number. But, here is someone that gets promoted under that number. How is that not favoritism?
Sue Anne
I have a question about this. During the discussion by the bureaucrats, they spent the entire time looking at the opposing comments. They analyzed them in detail. They then discounted all the ones that they felt shouldn't count for various reasons. Then, they proceeded to completely ignore the fact that many, possibly even hundreds, of the supporting comments had irrelevant reasons or even no reason at all. Here are some of the best examples: "Of course", "Yeah, I don't see why not", "seems a no-brainer to me." So basically, they remove all the irrelevant opposes from the equation, then leave all the irrelevant supports, and claim that consensus has been reached because the opposers' reasoning was faulty. If this isn't supposed to be a straw poll, and consensus is deteremined more by quality of arguements and not on quantity, then how does this even begin to make sense? Suddenly because there a lot of people with faulty or nonexistent reasoning, they override a few people who actually provide reasons? Tons of the supporting comments treated this as a no brainer. Any action drawing more than 100 oppose votes on Wikipedia can't possibly be termed a no brainer. The only reference to the supporting comments at all that I found was at the beginning from Taxman about how "Some comments in both the support and opposition sections are certainly not helpful. So far as I see it discounting those positions still leads to a nomination below the traditional promotion threshhold." There is never any mention of discounting any supporting comments at all throughout the rest of the discussion, only mentions of throwing out opposes. Could someone please explain how this fits common practice, and how I can learn from this when judging where consensus is going in the future? Under what circumstances is a decision so "obvious" that you can support with no reasoning at all, and then condemn the fairly significant opposition for their faulty reasoning and ignore their comments?
Dycedarg
It is common practice that Supports by default rightly mean "I have a good impression" or "I see nothing wrong" whereas the reasonable question to ask of an Oppose is "Why? What is the problem you identified?". Since properly it is not necessary that every admin candidate have single-handedly written a featured article or hand-held some newbie forever or saved someone's life or whatever, an unexplained Support means that the Supporter may have not gone through great pains to identify some stellar act of goodness by the candidate but nevertheless has had good experiences of him and has not detected serious problems.
There is nothing mysterious about such Support votes. If an Opposer were, however, to oppose with no explanation, the question is /why/ they opposed, what the problem is, and furthermore the only way for Opposers to convince anyone else to oppose or move away from the default good faith assumption of the candidate is to explain. If there is actually something truly wrong with a candidate, Opposers need to bring that to light and so they do.
Also, if you are looking to learn about consensus, don't use RfA as your basis. It is the least like a proper consensus-making process out of anything on Wikipedia. If you want to learn about consensus, go look at an article talk page where the participants are concerned about making an encyclopedic article.
On 4/10/07, Dycedarg darthvader1219@gmail.com wrote:
I have a question about this. During the discussion by the bureaucrats, they spent the entire time looking at the opposing comments. They analyzed them in detail. They then discounted all the ones that they felt shouldn't count for various reasons. Then, they proceeded to completely ignore the fact that many, possibly even hundreds, of the supporting comments had irrelevant reasons or even no reason at all. Here are some of the best examples: "Of course", "Yeah, I don't see why not", "seems a no-brainer to me." So basically, they remove all the irrelevant opposes from the equation, then leave all the irrelevant supports, and claim that consensus has been reached because the opposers' reasoning was faulty. If this isn't supposed to be a straw poll, and consensus is deteremined more by quality of arguements and not on quantity, then how does this even begin to make sense? Suddenly because there a lot of people with faulty or nonexistent reasoning, they override a few people who actually provide reasons? Tons of the supporting comments treated this as a no brainer. Any action drawing more than 100 oppose votes on Wikipedia can't possibly be termed a no brainer. The only reference to the supporting comments at all that I found was at the beginning from Taxman about how "Some comments in both the support and opposition sections are certainly not helpful. So far as I see it discounting those positions still leads to a nomination below the traditional promotion threshhold." There is never any mention of discounting any supporting comments at all throughout the rest of the discussion, only mentions of throwing out opposes. Could someone please explain how this fits common practice, and how I can learn from this when judging where consensus is going in the future? Under what circumstances is a decision so "obvious" that you can support with no reasoning at all, and then condemn the fairly significant opposition for their faulty reasoning and ignore their comments?
Dycedarg _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Dycedarg wrote:
I have a question about this. During the discussion by the bureaucrats, they spent the entire time looking at the opposing comments. They analyzed them in detail. They then discounted all the ones that they felt shouldn't count for various reasons. Then, they proceeded to completely ignore the fact that many, possibly even hundreds, of the supporting comments had irrelevant reasons or even no reason at all. Here are some of the best examples: "Of course", "Yeah, I don't see why not", "seems a no-brainer to me." So basically, they remove all the irrelevant opposes from the equation, then leave all the irrelevant supports, and claim that consensus has been reached because the opposers' reasoning was faulty. If this isn't supposed to be a straw poll, and consensus is deteremined more by quality of arguements and not on quantity, then how does this even begin to make sense? Suddenly because there a lot of people with faulty or nonexistent reasoning, they override a few people who actually provide reasons? Tons of the supporting comments treated this as a no brainer. Any action drawing more than 100 oppose votes on Wikipedia can't possibly be termed a no brainer. The only reference to the supporting comments at all that I found was at the beginning from Taxman about how "Some comments in both the support and opposition sections are certainly not helpful. So far as I see it discounting those positions still leads to a nomination below the traditional promotion threshhold." There is never any mention of discounting any supporting comments at all throughout the rest of the discussion, only mentions of throwing out opposes. Could someone please explain how this fits common practice, and how I can learn from this when judging where consensus is going in the future? Under what circumstances is a decision so "obvious" that you can support with no reasoning at all, and then condemn the fairly significant opposition for their faulty reasoning and ignore their comments?
In other words, it seems that you believe that you favour the side with the most windbags. If this is indeed a "vote" what difference does it make if someone does not explain his vote? If each person who voted spent only one minute on the process for this vote alone that's about 400 minutes or nearly seven hours of time wasted away from doing something constructive. Some windbags spent much more time than that.
Ec
On 4/11/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
In other words, it seems that you believe that you favour the side with the most windbags. If this is indeed a "vote" what difference does it make if someone does not explain his vote? If each person who voted spent only one minute on the process for this vote alone that's about 400 minutes or nearly seven hours of time wasted away from doing something constructive. Some windbags spent much more time than that.
Ec
I don't favor any side. I don't even participate on RFA regularly. What I'm trying to do is get some idea of what exactly RFA is, as opposed to what people say it is. Is it a vote or isn't it? Are people supposed to substantiate their opinions or not? If it's a vote then stop discounting oppose votes because of their stated opinions and come up with a hard number for passing and stick with it. If it's a discussion to determine consensus then start discounting useless support votes. As it is, it seems closer to a vote, with the occasional "interpretation of consensus" to justify controversial decisions.
On 4/11/07, Dycedarg darthvader1219@gmail.com wrote:
I don't favor any side. I don't even participate on RFA regularly. What I'm trying to do is get some idea of what exactly RFA is, as opposed to what people say it is. Is it a vote or isn't it? Are people supposed to substantiate their opinions or not? If it's a vote then stop discounting oppose votes because of their stated opinions and come up with a hard number for passing and stick with it. If it's a discussion to determine consensus then start discounting useless support votes. As it is, it seems closer to a vote, with the occasional "interpretation of consensus" to justify controversial decisions.
The reason that they don't discount useless support votes is because the main purpose of RfA is to see whether we trust the user in question with the tools. The default option is "support", but you must have a good reason to oppose.
~~~~
On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
The reason that they don't discount useless support votes is because the main purpose of RfA is to see whether we trust the user in question with the tools. The default option is "support", but you must have a good reason to oppose.
Does every opponent have to have a *different* good reason?
If not, then an "oppose" without details could easily mean "I agree with the reasons other people have given" and should be legitimate.
(And I think much of the ill feeling here is the knowledge that a RfA for anyone else would not be treated this way.)
On 4/11/07, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
The reason that they don't discount useless support votes is because the main purpose of RfA is to see whether we trust the user in question with
the
tools. The default option is "support", but you must have a good reason
to
oppose.
Does every opponent have to have a *different* good reason?
If not, then an "oppose" without details could easily mean "I agree with the reasons other people have given" and should be legitimate.
Well, yes but one should write "Oppose per UserX" for example.
~~~~
On 4/11/07, gjzilla@gmail.com gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/11/07, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
The reason that they don't discount useless support votes is because
the
main purpose of RfA is to see whether we trust the user in question
with
the
tools. The default option is "support", but you must have a good
reason
to
oppose.
Does every opponent have to have a *different* good reason?
If not, then an "oppose" without details could easily mean "I agree with the reasons other people have given" and should be legitimate.
Well, yes but one should write "Oppose per UserX" for example.
Another thing is that I think most of the discounted votes were along the lines of "Oppose because he implemented [[WP:OFFICE]] which is EVIL".
Johnleemk
º
On 4/11/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/11/07, gjzilla@gmail.com gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/11/07, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
The reason that they don't discount useless support votes is because
the
main purpose of RfA is to see whether we trust the user in question
with
the
tools. The default option is "support", but you must have a good
reason
to
oppose.
Does every opponent have to have a *different* good reason?
If not, then an "oppose" without details could easily mean "I agree with the reasons other people have given" and should be legitimate.
Well, yes but one should write "Oppose per UserX" for example.
Another thing is that I think most of the discounted votes were along the lines of "Oppose because he implemented [[WP:OFFICE]] which is EVIL".
Johnleemk _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
which is a statement about OFFICE itself, not about danny
that's why it was discounted as a reason against danny
On 4/11/07, Pedro Sanchez pdsanchez@gmail.com wrote:
Another thing is that I think most of the discounted votes were along
the
lines of "Oppose because he implemented [[WP:OFFICE]] which is EVIL".
which is a statement about OFFICE itself, not about danny
that's why it was discounted as a reason against danny
Exactly. Most of the oppose votes that were discounted did give reasons; they were just reasons that had nothing to do with Danny's fitness as an admin.
Johnleemk
John Lee wrote:
Exactly. Most of the oppose votes that were discounted did give reasons; they were just reasons that had nothing to do with Danny's fitness as an admin.
I again wonder which RfA some people were reading.
-Jeff
On Wed, 11 Apr 2007, Ray Saintonge wrote:
In other words, it seems that you believe that you favour the side with the most windbags. If this is indeed a "vote" what difference does it make if someone does not explain his vote?
I believe his complaint was that this was done selectively: many of the oppose votes were dismissed because they had little or no explanation, but lack of explanation was fine for the support votes.
On 4/11/07, Sue Reed sreed1234@yahoo.com wrote:
----- Original Message ---- From: John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com
Well, once you consider that many people opposed Danny for enforcing
policy, not explaining why he resigned his adminship, etc., and take them out of the equation, it's pretty apparent that the numbers are in the room to promote for 'crats - and that's assuming we want the 'crats to behave as cold, calculating machines and adhere to those silly strict numbers rules we've come up with.<<
If someone can oppose because a user is too young, doesn't have 10,000 edits, hasn't written an article that has been promoted to FA, why aren't these valid reasons to oppose.
o_0
I was under the impression that those were indeed invalid reasons to oppose, although in many cases, there's no need to actively discount such opinions since if those are the only reasons people can come up with to oppose, odds are the guy will pass RfA with or without their inclusion in the tally. I'm sure that if the 'crats were to handle every RfA like they handled Danny's, you'd see such reasons publicly being thrown out.
Of course, I'm a bit of an old fart, seeing as how when I was promoted to admin, I barely had over a thousand edits, wasn't even old enough to drink or drive (still am), and yet none of my opposes had anything to do with these things (and to top it off, I think I was promoted with something like 20 supports). Maybe the RfA procedure for handling such patently invalid reasoning has changed since my time.
Johnleemk
Sue Reed wrote:
From: John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com
Well, once you consider that many people opposed Danny for enforcing policy,
not explaining why he resigned his adminship, etc., and take them out of the equation, it's pretty apparent that the numbers are in the room to promote for 'crats - and that's assuming we want the 'crats to behave as cold, calculating machines and adhere to those silly strict numbers rules we've come up with.<<
If someone can oppose because a user is too young, doesn't have 10,000 edits, hasn't written an article that has been promoted to FA, why aren't these valid reasons to oppose. It seems as if the oppose votes weren't plagued by sockpuppets and they were valid users voting to oppose. I agree with someone's comments on one of the discussions that there is an obvious sign of favoritism when Danny gets promoted at 68% but other people don't. There seems to be a strong agreement by the community and by the bureaucrats in previous discussions that 70% is the number. But, here is someone that gets promoted under that number. How is that not favoritism?
People can have whatever silly reason they want for opposing anything. Saying that there is strong community consensus for a 70% vote for appointment as an admin is your own fabrication, and has absolutely no basis in fact. Just because the community has chosen to stand up to the RfA club does not imply favoritism.
Ec
On 4/11/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Just because the community has chosen to stand up to the RfA club
Evidences?
On 4/11/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
This thread.
Ec
No this thread was about the danny RFA where the majority of votes could not have come from any RFA club. There were simply to many of them.
On 4/11/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
People can have whatever silly reason they want for opposing anything.
No. No, no, no. If their reasons for opposing are silly, we should not listen to them, much less respect them.
Steve