[WikiEN-l] Bureaucrats decide!

[Christopher Hagar]

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 at 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
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