[WikiEN-l] Bureaucrats decide!

[Dycedarg]

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