Commons:Requests and votes/Gryffindor (de-adminship)/Bureaucrats discussion

Please note: this page is for the Bureaucrat discussion that will follow the closing of of this Deadminship request

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This page will be solely for bureaucrats' discussion. (list all Commons Bureaucrats)

There is a corresponding talk page, Commons talk:Administrators/Requests and votes/Gryffindor (de-adminship)/Bureaucrats discussion, that can be used for feedback and comment by community members. All such comments will be read and taken on board before a final decision is rendered. Comments inadvertently left here may be refactored to that page.

Voter analysis

See also User:Elcobbola/Gryffindor (de-adminship)

There are two main ways to look at the results of this vote:

• the purely mathematical way,
• and the "taking in consideration all arguments" (consensus) way.

We can strive to have a mixed system between these two methods, with all their pros and cons. To vote an user as admin, there is a 75% threshold and we do look at arguments when the percentages are on the limit (let me recall Commons:Administrators/Requests and votes/Giggy: it was just above 75%); there is actually no defined threshold for de-adminship. However, allow me to quote LX, for I share his opinion on this: "the requirements to overthrow a previous decision to grant adminship should be as high as the requirements placed on the original decision". Having this in mind, let's look at things both ways:

The pure mathematical way: There are in total 70 votes excluding neutral votes, of which 47 "remove" and 23 "keep". This gives a 67.1% approval of de-adminship. I feel, however, that Treublatt ( local | logs | global )'s vote should be ignored, since this account only showed up on Commons to participate in this discussion. Looking at User:Elcobbola/Gryffindor (de-adminship), there are at least three other users (Abbatissa ( local | logs | global ), Latzel ( local | logs | global ) and Andim ( local | logs | global )) that have very few contributions on Commons (less than 30). I am not suggesting that these should be ignored, because they do have useful contributions (but see below my note about "canvassing"). Removing Treublatt's vote gives us 68,1%; additionally, if we would remove Abbatissa, Latzel and Andim's votes, we would have 66,7%. So tweaking with these is largely irrelevant. Taking neutral votes into account would of course only dilute even more this counting. Please do double check my counting, I might have missed something.

The consensus way: I believe most people, including many of the ones voting "keep", acknowledge that Gryffindor did wrong. Most vote "keep" seemingly to push for some sort of dispute resolution, with some stating that this was not a tool abuse case per se. I stated already that I do think his actions were not appropriate, so my personal position on this is known. But right now, I have the bureaucrat hat on, and my personal position is irrelevant. What I interpret from this is that the majority wishes to see that image renames are done only in specific cases and with consensus, regardless of previous mistakes done in this field (Gryffindor was certainly not the first user to push with controversial image renames, and I'm afraid he might not be the last).

About canvassing: After checking who was voting , I realized that "canvassing" is a bit of a strong word for what happened here. There was advertising of this de-adminship request on de.wikipedia, without much doubt, but we must see that most of the de.wp users that voted here are also Commons users, many of them long term contributers to this project. Regardless of their feelings for Gryffindor, and regardless of the presence of "advertising", their voices are to be heard. Also, there are non-de.wp users that are regular Commons users (including several admins) that feel that Gryffindor should lose his adminship. This said, I must say I have a very strong opinion about this "advertising" in other projects, and canvassing in general: I think this type of attitude is condemnable, to say the least. Yes, different communities have different ways of doing things, and Commons is made of different communities, but exactly because of this it is perhaps better to take the least common denominator when trying to solve a conflict, the order of things being talk, talk, talk, talk a little more, then do something drastic when all the talking doesn't work. It is perhaps a good time to set up a disputes handling process, as O suggested.

Looking at these different aspects from a global perspective, I feel that there is not enough consensus to request removal of tools on Meta, either mathematically or argumentatively, but that there is a more notable consensus about how image renames should be done, and that this was not the good way. I suggest we work on this problem now and decide what to do with the already renamed images.

A final word: I don't know where from this animosity between German speakers and English speakers came, but it must stop here, now. We are working together with many different people from many different communities towards a commons goal: to construct and maintain a freely licensed media repository, Wikimedia Commons. Whoever is not here to help with this should consider clicking the log out button. Patrícia ^msg 20:19, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Did you read the last sentence at Commons:Administrators/De-adminship: Instead, "majority consensus" should be used, whereby any consensus to demote of higher than about 50% is sufficient to remove the admin. According to the first sentence on this page, it is an official rule, so if you want to change it to 75% then this should be discussed, but currently 50% is the valid number. This part of the rule was added by Lar [1]. -- Cecil (talk) 21:31, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I stand corrected, I missed that part indeed. Although I don't know what a "majority consensus" is. Either we have a majority, or a consensus. This said, there is then a majority to ask for removal. I stand by my other comments, though. Patrícia ^msg 21:47, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Based on my memory of the discussion at the time... "Majority consensus" is a coined term, but it means "about 50%"... the thinking was that while it takes about 75% to get adminship, it should not take only 25% to remove it. Instead, there should be a stronger feeling among the community than just one quarter. If three fourths of those commenting think we should make someone an admin, make them an admin and see how it goes. But if later, about half (give or take) of those commenting think we made a mistake, why then, we probably did. The margin being higher allows for the tendency to "make enemies" not being a way to get forced out. I hope that clarifies the thinking there, and this is the standard that our policy requires us to use. I'll carry out an analysis of the actual commentary later. ++Lar: t/c 03:53, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

(UC)Besides, the analysis by Elcobbola is not really correct. The attribution of the users to their most active project totally ignored the admin-actions, which caused in my case that I suddenly was more active at de.Wiki (nearly 30.000 admin-actions at Commons did not count at all). And SterkeBak had withdrawn his 'keep'-vote to 'neutral', but was still listed as 'keep'. -- Cecil (talk) 21:49, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't do the counting of votes from that page, but from the actual request page. Elcobbola's page is interesting to view users' profiles, though. Patrícia ^msg 21:54, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

De-adminship is not the same thing as adminship, and the way this was handled was rather poor. 50% for de-adminship is rather a low threshhold, notably for someone who is unpopular in the moment. I'm opposed to removing Gryffindor's op bit based on this "vote". This should have been started with a Request for Comment before anything else. Bastique ^demandez 22:38, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree, it should have been. ++Lar: t/c 03:56, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Additionally, I'm rather disturbed that a group of German Wikipedians would have a conversation and complaint leading to the desysop of a long-term Commons admin, without even allowing that person to contribute to the conversation in question. This is an "angry mob"; make no mistake about it, and it's akin to a group of people firing themselves up in a bar in which they hang out, and then overturning the village to hang a villager without so much as providing any insight to the rest of the villagers as to the situation. It's unfortunate that more members of the community who were also not active on German Wikipedia were not involved.

This is the type of thing that requires a creative solution (as with the recent RFA for SterkeBak). Proposal to follow. Bastique ^demandez 01:23, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Proposed remedy

Firstly, let me say that I have great respect for a great many of the users who have spoken up in favor of desysoping Gryffindor, even if I think the decision has been done hastily, and without due process. I also want to state that in no way should it be considered as representative of de.wikipedia as a whole, or the entire community or that anyone should point fingers at de.wikipedia; I know an awful lot of people who are active members of the Commons from Germany who did not take part in this discussion whatsoever.

I would like to underscore that this discussion has the appearance of being done in a hasty fashion, and without consideration of some sort of due process; it is not, in fact, fair to the admin in question to bring up an RFdA without some sort of due process. However, it seems we have adopted this strange policy requiring a bare threshhold of 50% for desysoping (itself done without much attention from the community); and it seems a bad idea to complain too much that I haven't had a voice in either the policy or the desysopping vote itself. The Commons bureaucrats have an obligation toward the masses who have gathered here to declare their wish to remove the sysop bit from Gryffindor.

My proposed remedy is thus; in consideration of this vote, that Gryffindor be desysoped; but only on a temporary basis, no less than 90 days. Perhaps in that time, hot tempers can cool off.

In the meantime, all interested parties should join in a Request for Comment; thereby allowing a broader participation of the community in order to discuss the principals involved and the rationale for this request for desysoping, but also to afford Gryffindor an opportunity to defend his actions and/or realize the error of his ways. This allows the process to run its course.

At the end of 90 days, Gryffindor would regain his bit. If there are objections to that, this process can recommence again, but I have faith, given the participants that, at the very least, everyone will have a bit more sense of what's going on. Bastique ^demandez 01:58, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

• I think this is a fine suggestion and I'd support it, after perhaps some discussion to see if it needs a few tweaks. One tweak: I'd make the 90 days part be firm instead of "no less". I'd also like to see us use this time to clarify some issues with the current deadminship policy... it has the loophole of not requiring notice and discussion in project wide venues first. But that's a comment, not a perquisite for the proposal to get my support. ++Lar: t/c 02:06, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I am unfamiliar of what happened exactly, so I consider myself a disinterested user who just want to say something while neither supporting nor opposing removal of Gryffindor's admin flag. The idea of scheduled removal and resumption simply asks the subject to step off the adminship for a while. Due to allegation of non-exist dispute resolution before the vote, reissuing the admin flag after 90 days without separate community vote looks fine to me and may satisfy most users, whether they want the adminship kept or removed.--Jusjih (talk) 03:17, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't think the bit should be given back without an RfA. We are expected to determine if the de-adminship policy was followed or if the process was thwarted in some way. Since it was a mass of active Commons users deciding for de-adminship, we are simply to follow their wish. I fully support setting up a Request for Comments where the issue can be further discussed (if it's fine to give the bit back with or without an RfA) but we should not be deciding that on our own.

If there is no opposal on removing rights, I'll ask that myself on Meta later today, we cannot be dragging this issue forever. How and if the rights will be given back is a later, separate issue to be discussed after this.

(Apologies for not having commented more on this a bit sooner, I was travelling and without Internet connection.) Patrícia ^msg 11:47, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I think there is an agreement among all parties that removing rights is in order. Bastique ^demandez 18:18, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree with this suggestion. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:32, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

De-adminship

Since there is a consensus for removal of tools, I have asked this to be done on Meta. The request has been attended and Gryffindor is no longer an administrator on Commons.

I suggest we start setting up a discussion outside of this page on how, when and if the tools should be given back, as Bastique suggested (a RfC of some sort). Patrícia ^msg 21:40, 16 December 2008 (UTC)