On 10/12/2007, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
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.
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.
If the person acts unilaterally they know that that it is their reputation on the line and theirs alone. In addition there is no real way they can mentally partition themselves from their actions. We know that people are prepared to go further when they think there is some kind of authority that will support them. There is a risk that people people will view the group as such an authority. through in the problem of such groups tending to be selectable and things are only going to get worse.
If you are going to consult privately it is probably best done with a group you have little control over the membership of (say select 10 admins at random from the admin list).