User:Sunrise/Additional advice on closing discussions

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

This is a companion page to

. It’s primarily a collection of notes, and contains everything that didn’t go into the main essay: it includes personal strategies, personal commentary and reflection, speculation, things that didn’t fit anywhere else, things I’m not sure about, etc. Comments are approximately sorted by the section they correspond to in the main essay, and referring to the main essay may be required to understand the context.

General principles

• I’ve had cases where I write out a full close and then decide to discard it, either because I’m not sure that the close will stick or I’m not completely confident in it. More generally, you should be prepared to abandon a close if something comes up during your evaluation that makes you anything other than very confident in your ability to avoid any influence on the close.

• Personal involvement can come in many forms. For example, even without an opinion about the question, opinions about the general topic area can also be an issue: someone with an opinion on the I/P conflict should avoid closing within the I/P topic area, etc.

• Personal relationships (positive or negative) with any of the prominent participants in the dispute may also be relevant to involvement. A small amount of this should be permissible (e.g. if a wikifriend left a single comment, I think most people should be able to maintain neutrality), but a sufficiently large amount should not be. I’ve seen this become relevant in a couple of appeals, and it will usually be one of my considerations when I decide whether or not I should call myself involved, but I don’t often see people discuss it.

• One way to think of closures is that at the end of the RfC, the outcome has already been determined by the participants, and the closer’s role is solely to certify what that outcome is. In this sense, the process of closing is purely procedural. While this is a useful framework to use as a closer, I wouldn’t put it in the main essay due to the risk that participants might take it as a suggestion that they can act on a (perceived) result before the close actually occurs.

• If you have some degree of preference but believe you can be neutral, then ask yourself beforehand if you’re prepared to close against your preference if the discussion leans in that direction, and afterwards ask if you would truly make the same closure if you had a different opinion.

• Other warning signs suggesting you shouldn’t close a discussion, beyond those in the box: if you notice yourself hoping to end up with a particular outcome, if you find it difficult to imagine closing with any particular result, if you think you have a definitive answer before completing your analysis, etc.

Common results

• I prefer to be cautious in calling something a local consensus in a closure, since except in obvious cases it’s difficult to argue that I’m not applying any personal judgement. Except in obvious cases, local consensus can’t really be determined unambiguously until the discussion is removed to a broader venue. As a result, I usually describe it as a possibility instead of a certainty (e.g. “this could be a local consensus”) along with my reasoning.

• I may say “weak/tentative consensus” (for or against) if there are specific procedural reasons that the discussion may fall short of a true consensus. For example, this might happen if a question is only discussed by a few people, or the proposal with the most support was only suggested towards the end of the discussion and may not have been seen by many people. The idea is to say that there would be a consensus if the discussion were taken at face value, but I have reason to believe that there are reasons that this does not represent a “true” consensus. This is the same concept that I use when I think there might be a local consensus, except that in that case I’ll use that specific term. In any case, I will usually specify that further discussion may be necessary to clarify the result. Note that this result should not be used for cases where a discussion is close to the line between consensus and no consensus, because in that situation the expectation is that I exercise my judgment as a closer. For the same reason, this result should not be used when the relative weighting or strength of arguments (including due to SPAs, sockpuppets, etc) is at issue

Making decisions

• One of the more effective approaches to closing in controversial areas is to consider your primary goals to include de-escalation and reduction of drama.

• There are different opinions whether editors should be discounted based on sanctions that are applied during the RfC. To expand on the comment in the main essay: one argument is that they were editors in good standing (or at least better standing) at the time they made their comments, while an opposing argument is that whatever problems exist preceded the sanction and the timing of when it was recognized is not relevant. I’m inclined to say that there’s a sliding scale, with the primary factors being the severity of the offense, how related it is to the RfC (e.g. whether the sanction is associated with behavior in the same topic area), and whether it’s likely to affect the arguments (e.g. a sanction associated with POV pushing may indicate problems with their arguments).

• When an editor clearly misunderstands the policies they are citing across multiple RfCs, it might be defensible to discount their comments in other RfCs as well even if they don’t explicitly include those misunderstandings. I haven’t decided what the best approach is here.

• When including reasons for discounting comments in the closure, too much detail may give ammunition to wikilawyers. One of my preferred approaches for this is to reference a statement that clearly violates policy as an example. The violation of policy should be clear enough that anyone who understands the policy will agree (and if that’s not the case, that suggests you’re using a personal interpretation)

• Numbers may also be relevant to support cases of IAR, although in practice few editors will explicitly call for IAR even if supporting another editor who did. Also, note that implicitly arguing IAR is different from simply making an argument that’s contrary to policy: an IAR argument requires that the editor knows what the policy actually is and has a good argument for why it should be bypassed in this particular circumstance.

• If there was an article edit about the subject under dispute and it doesn’t appear to have been challenged, the closure might be easier because it means that editors may have already come to agreement.

• If a comment refers to a previous discussion without linking it, on active talk pages it should be understandable if you can’t find the section. Of course, you should still make the attempt, especially if the information appears to be important background material or is otherwise important to their arguments.

• With regards to specialized terminology, note this may include the use of otherwise common words as terms of art with specific definitions. This is similar to the way that words like “reliable” and “neutral” mean different things on Wikipedia than they do in general use.

Writing the close

• I lean towards including more detail in closes being better. A couple of reasons I left out since they could be considered subcategories of other points: it is harder for others to make assumptions about your motivations or competence in closing, it makes it clear to others that you’ve seriously considered the issues, and it encourages me to consider my words more carefully than if I were explaining it in a back-and-forth discussion on a talk page. Another thing is that anything you say in clarifications is more easily forgotten, but the person supporting minimization might consider that an advantage.

• Even though shorter closes tend to be harder to wikilawyer, it isn’t necessarily an inherent characteristic. As long as you choose your words carefully, adding detail can lead to increased clarity about the meaning of the close.

• As a general rule, I don’t cite the comments of participants as part of the reasoning in a closure. Some closers will recommend using comments by specific editors for this purpose, but I think it can give the impression that you’re singling out one editor as more important than the others.

• If an editor’s meaning was unclear, one option is asking them to clarify. While there’s nothing wrong with doing it, possible disadvantages include: it could be viewed as unfair, it makes the close less impersonal (and is therefore more likely to be challenged, etc), and may also essentially commit you to making the close when you haven’t finished evaluating the discussion yet.

• When making it clear why the discussion closed against someone, one approach can be to imagine you personally agree with the editors who you’re closing against, and try to explain it in that context. Especially in controversial discussions, closing against your personal opinion and noting it in the close may actually make the close stronger, since it’s a strong argument against the idea you might be supervoting. (That said, make sure it’s true – I’ve seen cases where someone makes this claim and other editors later find evidence from prior comments that it isn’t the case.)

• In some cases, certain actions may appear to be logical consequences of your close, but if you include this in the close it’s probably better to clarify that you’re making an inference, in case anyone disagrees with it.

• On framing, my preferred first sentence is “Responding to the request for closure at ANRFC.” I usually include this every time in case any of the participants are unfamiliar with formal closures. If I think outside organizations are watching, I’ll add something like “to evaluate the consensus among editors in this discussion,” and possibly more depending on the situation. I may expand on principles such as explaining the nature of RfCs, consensus not being a vote, and so forth. I may also go into greater detail explaining my reasoning, the specific basis of my reasoning in Wikipedia policies and guidelines, etc.

• If you close a discussion differently from what the numbers would imply, you should have a strong reason that is clearly explained in your close. But at the same time, when there is a good reason, then you’re required to account for that. Ultimately, you can never go against the community, and when you close against the weight of numbers, you are referencing a larger consensus (specifically, the one that the policy is based in).

• If suggestions are based on points that were mentioned in the discussion but didn’t receive much followup, it may be relevant to add a phrase like “as suggested in the discussion” to give the idea correct attribution and to point readers to a more comprehensive description.

• Note that helping to move the discussion forward does not mean simply choosing consensus over no consensus. Among other things, if it leads to a challenge then the discussion will be prevented from moving forward.

• One approach for minimizing the need to edit closures or address objections is to explicitly check the close to minimize the number of potentially disputable statements, and to focus your reasoning on unambiguous facts. This is the same principle as checking each sentence to make sure you didn’t accidentally choose prescriptive rather than descriptive wording, or imply that you considered your personal opinion.

• Using “withdrawn by nominator” as the outcome is another case where you might choose to avoid using the word “consensus.” It’s the same as finding consensus against the proposal, but this is a more “friendly” outcome if the nominator has already recognized that their proposal has no support.

After the close

• I preferred to let someone else archive my sections even when all the archiving was done manually. The idea was to get a bit more transparency, i.e. to imply that someone else has checked over your work and made sure that the issue is closed.

• If an issue is ambiguous, I might reverse on the grounds that it’s important to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, to maintain the authority and integrity of the closing process. I think I’m more willing to reverse my closes than most, though.

• I think requesting a second opinion at ANRFC might be a good habit to encourage, to let people check for whether an appeal is likely to succeed and potentially resolve challenges more efficiently. It might also be a way for new closers to get advice from those with more experience.

• Note that you’re involved with respect to the question of whether your closure was appropriate. That said, you generally shouldn’t be endorsing your own closure in any case!

• I’ve never understood the impulse to jump straight to appeal without discussion: talking to the closer first essentially gives you an extra level of appeal, and shouldn’t take more than a couple of days. Even if you plan to appeal regardless, you’re also giving up the opportunity to learn more about the closer’s reasoning and improve your arguments as a result.

See also

• Advice on closing discussions