From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>
Consensus is a fantastic method for governance when the decision is
something with directly effects everyone... it is perhaps the only
method for governance where it is possible to act without ethical
compromises.
However consensus only achieves that level of fairness when inaction
is less harmful than action.
Which is clearly the case, given that there are no real problems with the
existing situation, and 500 admins and growing to take care of admin duties.
In the case of those adminships, there was no consensus
to admin but
there was also no consensus to fail to admin. Because adminship is no
big deal, and because the natural state of a longtime and trustworthy
user should be as an admin, it would be reasonable to argue that the
correct result of a no consensus adminship should be adminning.
Exactly. And the people who are denied adminship are generally either not
longterm or not trustworthy. Of course there will be exceptions to this,
but these are few and far between. If we radically re-vamp existing
processes with very low error rates in an attempt to achieve perfection, we
are fooling ourselves; no process is perfect, none will ever be, and the
likelihood that a new process will achieve fewer errors is low.
The adminships I cited were not just random failures:
There's no evidence they were "failures" at all.
In each of the
cited the reasons given by the oppose were cited by a fair number of
the supporters as not reasons to oppose. In each of the cases the
support community contained a group of wikipedians at least as well
respected and as experienced as users in the opposed camp.
i.e. There was no consensus.
By failing to act on these adminships we have done a
great disservice
to the Wikipedia community.
This is simply hyperbole.
Short of actually being adminned, these
users will have no way of proving themselves. (that much is clear, at
least one of them had a failed prior adminship due to real issues and
put in an additional year of hard work before someone renominated).
The community changes and evolves; there are many cases of people who failed
at amin nominations the first time, only to be accepted the second time, so
there is clearly no systemic issue here. Rather, these individual cases
raised specific and individual concerns that had not been adequately dealt
with at the time of nomination.
The complex popularity game that it takes to become an
admin turns
adminship into something it should not be, a big deal... and it is our
duty to tack action to fix that.
No, it turns it into what it should be; a process for ensuring that admins
are trusted by the community and created by consensus. There is no duty to
take action to fix something that it not broken; on the contrary, it is our
duty to ensure that working processes are not damaged by those seeking
solutions to non-existent problems which will not improve Wikipedia as an
encyclopedia.
Jay.