Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-10473115-20170214023153/@comment-10473115-20170218194709

Thanks for the replies. I agree with LoveWaffle that Nausiated had let his personal preferences to cloud his interpretation of consensus. It's quite an easy trap to fall on and I'll hope that he gives a more thought for that in the future.

Special kudos for Shabook actually trying to figure the problems with our decision making. How to close discussions is indeed a problem for us. I think that it's less about a time given to discussions but more about lack of willingness to close those. As we don't have policies or even a convention how to do that, it's easy to understand why nobody wants to make that call. I can also tell from my previous experience that closing a discussion is a difficult task. You have to give weight to all opinions and craft a decision hoping that everyone can agree.

It's also very difficult to decipher a consensus from massive forum thread with very cluttered discussion. I think that learning the consensus from forum thread is only possible for very precise and clear defined suggestions. Forum is very good for gathering opinions and brain storming but if it seems that voting is needed, Talk pages are much better suited for that.

To come back to problem which prompted this thread, the original proposition was much too complex to discuss in a forum thread without unanimous decision. Shabook proposed on the declaration thread to split decisions up to smaller ones. That could work and definitely would be improvement to current situation but I think that best option for this would have been to draft a policy/guideline page and allow everyone to edit it with continuing discussion on a forum. Policy page would have allowed everyone to clearly see what's proposed and it would have been served as document after the decision. Forum threads aren't good at referencing policies, we should have those at own policy pages at project namespace. If we would have done that, this confusion could have been avoided and we would have a page to refer.

I agree with a proposition on this thread to unhighlight a problematic declaration but didn't want to do it myself. There's many others who can push the button if they want to. Also I feel that without answers from other admins I might be only one thinking that way. Also other users who aren't allowed to post here have been quiet on that thread so maybe I've misinterpreted the confusion about policies. Still, it's confusing to me and I hope that we can clear this thing about appearances.

So to conclude my post, I'm not here to accuse anyone or trying to be difficult. I just think that our decision making is flawed and we should fix that.