Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26845762-20170713190006/@comment-188432-20170715010032

On the main point of the thread
The addition of a few sentences to T:CHANGE merely brought it in line with T:BOUND, which has long said that "there is no guarantee that every rule will be discussed by the community". I read that at T:BOUND the other day and thought that it was slightly in conflict with T:CHANGE. So I added a few sentences that gave enough definition at T:CHANGE to allow for T:BOUND.

It really wasn't a big deal or an attempt to "sneak something through".

As Amorkuz and Shambala108 have pointed it out, it has always been the de facto case here at Tardis -- and long before I became an admin -- that admin can close a thread contrary to what the majority appear to want. That's why I said back in a June 2011 forum closure that we generally "adhere to the Wikipedia philosophy that a wiki is not a democracy, and that voting should in no way replace discussion".

This is a basic wiki philosophy. It also happens with great regularity at similarly large, old wikis at FANDOM.

What it most decidedly is not is a change.

See, it is not possible to write rules for a wiki wherein you take into account every possible situation against which the rule might be challenged. Sometimes you find that one rule can be taken one way, and another seems to say something slightly different. Occasional clarification of one rule versus another, or one rule versus a situation not imagined at the time the rule was promulgated, is one of the core jobs that admin have. Many rules have been edited over time. This is just one of them. But it was edited merely for purposes of clarification of long-standing policy. It does not signal any sort of change in the way that admin actually deal with thread closure.

Our thread closure methodolgy is sound
Latter posts, above, seeking some kind of review of thread closure practice aren't really going to be considered here. This forum thread can't be used as a "backdoor" way to talk about matters that have been settled. That's a T:POINT violation which can't be indulged.

I will just recapitulate that we have a small admin staff and the hope is that an admin not involved in a particular thread will be the one to close it. That might superficially look like someone from the outside swooped in and hit the whole discussion for six, but that's not what's happening.

Admin do deliberately hang back from participating in a thread, but they're reading every post as it's made. And it's really the outcome itself is more likely to be your point of contention. If an admin who had not participated in a thread came into it and closed it as you had wished, you probably would be just fine with that. I'm unaware, for example, of any substantial pushback against the several Dr. Men (series) rulings.

It's like being an umpire at a baseball game. When you call someone safe, the offense loves you. When you call 'em out, the very same offensive side hates you. Even though you're the same person, using the same rules. You just happen to arrive at two different conclusions based on two different sets of facts. So it's not the method of closure that's the genuine issue. It's really just the fact that when your propositions fail, you don't like the ump anymore.

Well, all us umps were once users. We all have been on the losing side of arguments. In fact, the more you participate in the forums, the greater number of "forum fails" will you have. I can't tell you how many times Tangerineduel simply rejected something I'd proposed. It just happens.

What's the question, again?
Another thing that is important to point out is that not all people who start a thread -- and I'm not talking about anyone here in particular -- do so on the basis of any factual research. They just "feel" that something should be a certain way on the wiki, and maybe if they start the ball rolling with enough emotional "spin", they can get others to join them. Before you know it, there are five people who've joined the quest -- yet none of them have actually done any research on the core issue. That's why it's up to the admin to say, "Hold on, let's take a look at the facts." And that's why the notion of having a "majority of over three users .. be given a chance to take salient points into account before the closure of the thread" is a non-starter. Again, just because you have five people saying that they believe Doctor Who started in 1962 doesn't mean they're right. More to the point, many forum threads don't have as many as three people on the same side. So it's just not a practicable idea.

Saying things like "admins [close] threads they disagree with" is not just untrue, but it casts dangerous aspersions on the admin staff. It suggests a level of bias I have not noticed amongst any of our staff. We really try to close having made a finding of fact, and often we talk amongst ourselves about a closure to help us eliminate bias. This can mean that we spend a few hours on a simple Reference desk closure, genuinely trying to find an answer.

At the end of the day, the whole admin staff tries very hard to close in an intelligent, unbiased way. We've been using this same method for years, generally without incident. It's the best compromise we can devise, given our relatively small staff, the need to make some kind of progress on the wiki from the forum topics at hand, and our goal to try to have some sort of objectivity.

Timing is everything
Having threads languish for months (sometimes years!) is not ideal. The point of the forums is not just to talk about things, but to discuss things with ambition. The point is to come to a decision about whether to take the path envisioned by the thread. To suggest that we're just coming in and making snap judgments without trying to fairly adjudicate is kinda insulting.

Since it was already mentioned, I'll just use Thread:191574 as an example. I spent several hours with the closure of that thread. It took substantial research, not to mention listening to the entirety of the audioplay in question. Obviously, you can legitimately say you don't like the closure itself. But to say that it was hastily or irresponsibly closed is flatly wrong. I definitely considered the arguments that had been advanced, but thought them insufficient next to what was discovered through primary research. That's what you want in most thread closures. You want admin who are willing to do primary research on an issue so that it's closed on the basis of fact.

Now, because we've put in a lot of time on a thread -- and we're staring at a lot more, not to mention our other admin projects and the fact that we'd (yanno, one day, maybe) like to get back to editing simple pages about a franchise we love -- we do, I think, have the right to say that if we offer a substantial closing on Thread:Whatever. we're done with it. You might want more discussion, but it is both okay and necessary for the admin staff to call time. Maybe that'll be a month, maybe a year, maybe only a day. But it's important to realise that you probably don't understand how much is on any admin's plate. If you've attracted the attention of one of an admin, and the thread gets closed, please, as T:CHANGE has said even before Frozen: let it go. You might lose this one. You might win it. But either way, your viewpoint has been well-considered.

Finally, a closer doesn't have to -- no, strike that, simply cannot -- address every single point that's ever brought up in a thread. I mean this thread has only been up for a day, and it's already got too many points to address. I've been typing for three hours. Heck, I gave up my entire Christmas holiday to the Faction Paradox debate. So, no, I don't think that a user has the right to say that a closing argument is flawed just because an admin left out a response to the second sentence of the twenty-seventh post.

We give as fulsome a response as we can, given the time we have. And then we move on to the next thread. That's all you as user can reasonably expect. And you might not care about that next thread, but it's just as important to another user as yours was to you.

Seriously, look at any other wiki, then look at how Shambala and Amorkuz and PnP and SOTO and I close threads here. We give you a ton of our time as compared to the typical wiki at FANDOM.