Mailing List Archive: Wikipedia: Foundation

Unable to vote

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waerth at asianet

Jun 2, 2008, 7:30 AM

Post #1 of 21 (909 views)
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Unable to vote

It is impossible for me to vote unfortunately ..... I keep on getting
the message:

Your Wikimedia user ID could not be determined. Please log in to the
wiki where you are qualified to vote, and go to [[Special:Boardvote]].
You must use an account with at least 600 contributions before 00:00, 1
March 2008, and have made at least 50 contributions between 00:00, 1
January 2008 and 00:00, 29 May 2008.

I am logged into nl.wikipedia, but I registered with SUL recently.

Waerth

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philippebeaudette at gmail

Jun 2, 2008, 11:33 AM

Post #2 of 21 (894 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

Thanks, Waerth - I've forwarded it on to see if we can track it down.

Philippe

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Waerth" <waerth [at] asianet>
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2008 9:30 AM
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l [at] lists>
Subject: [Foundation-l] Unable to vote

> It is impossible for me to vote unfortunately ..... I keep on getting
> the message:
>
> Your Wikimedia user ID could not be determined. Please log in to the
> wiki where you are qualified to vote, and go to [[Special:Boardvote]].
> You must use an account with at least 600 contributions before 00:00, 1
> March 2008, and have made at least 50 contributions between 00:00, 1
> January 2008 and 00:00, 29 May 2008.
>
> I am logged into nl.wikipedia, but I registered with SUL recently.
>
> Waerth
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l [at] lists
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

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adhair at gmail

Jun 2, 2008, 12:38 PM

Post #3 of 21 (888 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

Unfortunately, I've been so busy chairing the Chapters Committee,
administering the Foundation mailing list, and sorting through a few
hundred Wikimania scholarship applications that I haven't had much
time to edit Wikipedia lately.

On 29 May, when I had planned a nice weekend of editing ahead of me, I
was told that the cutoff for recent edits had been changed from 1 June
to that day. Interpreting "between 01 January and 29 May 2008" to
mean "from 2008-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2008-05-29 23:59:59 UTC," I made
a smattering of edits and just barely made it in, or so I thought.

Unfortunately, the definition of "between" being used for the purpose
of suffrage is rather different, so it looks like I won't be voting
this year.

Austin

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nawrich at gmail

Jun 2, 2008, 12:50 PM

Post #4 of 21 (890 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

I don't remember seeing a notice in an update from Pathoschild that the
eligibility requirements had experienced a second date change. Did I miss
it?

Nathan
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jwales at wikia

Jun 2, 2008, 12:51 PM

Post #5 of 21 (891 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

:-(

I think we should in the future do away with edit-based suffrage
requirements in favor of something else. First, being an editor with N
edits is hardly what we are really looking for... what we are looking
for is "responsible people actually associated with our community".
Second, there are many of those people who, like Austin or some of the
developers, are unable to vote because they have been doing other
incredibly useful stuff.

I would almost go so far as to say that suffrage should go to project
admins, completely ignoring edit count.

But this is just a random thought passing through my head at this
moment, so please don't freak out on me. :)

Austin Hair wrote:
> Unfortunately, I've been so busy chairing the Chapters Committee,
> administering the Foundation mailing list, and sorting through a few
> hundred Wikimania scholarship applications that I haven't had much
> time to edit Wikipedia lately.
>
> On 29 May, when I had planned a nice weekend of editing ahead of me, I
> was told that the cutoff for recent edits had been changed from 1 June
> to that day. Interpreting "between 01 January and 29 May 2008" to
> mean "from 2008-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2008-05-29 23:59:59 UTC," I made
> a smattering of edits and just barely made it in, or so I thought.
>
> Unfortunately, the definition of "between" being used for the purpose
> of suffrage is rather different, so it looks like I won't be voting
> this year.
>
> Austin
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l [at] lists
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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wknight8111 at gmail

Jun 2, 2008, 1:07 PM

Post #6 of 21 (890 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwales [at] wikia> wrote:
> I think we should in the future do away with edit-based suffrage
> requirements in favor of something else. First, being an editor with N
> edits is hardly what we are really looking for... what we are looking
> for is "responsible people actually associated with our community".
> Second, there are many of those people who, like Austin or some of the
> developers, are unable to vote because they have been doing other
> incredibly useful stuff.
>
> I would almost go so far as to say that suffrage should go to project
> admins, completely ignoring edit count.

I like this idea. I imagine some kind of "invitational" system. We
start with a set of people who are guaranteed eligible (current admins
might be a good start). People who are eligible can invite any number
of other editors to be eligible also. This way, eligibility propagates
exponentially through the community. Necessary in this kind of scheme
is some way to weed out the obvious sockpuppets and bozos, of course.

With Jimmy, this is just a first idea for me too, and we have a year
to think of better ones.

--Andrew Whitworth

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gmaxwell at gmail

Jun 2, 2008, 1:13 PM

Post #7 of 21 (889 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwales [at] wikia> wrote:
> :-(
>
> I think we should in the future do away with edit-based suffrage
> requirements in favor of something else. First, being an editor with N
> edits is hardly what we are really looking for... what we are looking
> for is "responsible people actually associated with our community".
> Second, there are many of those people who, like Austin or some of the
> developers, are unable to vote because they have been doing other
> incredibly useful stuff.
>
> I would almost go so far as to say that suffrage should go to project
> admins, completely ignoring edit count.

Adminship is politicized on all the larger projects, causing a lot of
experienced, competent, deeply invested users to have zero interest in
adminship. It's a mismatch.

The point of the edit count limit is to include all regular editors
not just a cabal, but to add some friction against someone minting a
lot of sock accounts. Its fine that it includes a few crazy people,
since they should be offset by the large number of fairly sane people.

Between the limit and the implicit checkuser that happens to all
voters, it seems to be doing a reasonable job at preventing sock mob
voting. As far as enabling all contributors: It's nearly impossible
to be around regularly editing for a year or so and not make that
many... and if you haven't and want to you can easily crank out that
many in a few days (I think Domas did this).

For developers/sysadmins/meta-pedians you could simply create an
additional rule as was done for staff. I don't think many people would
object to a rule making that that says "If you have SVN checkin to the
mediawiki ,SVN or if you have elevated access to the foundation
servers, or if you've made 400 posts to the foundation's lists, or if
you've billed more than 400 hours to the WMF, you can vote".

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shimgray at gmail

Jun 2, 2008, 1:19 PM

Post #8 of 21 (889 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

2008/6/2 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell [at] gmail>:

> For developers/sysadmins/meta-pedians you could simply create an
> additional rule as was done for staff. I don't think many people would
> object to a rule making that that says "If you have SVN checkin to the
> mediawiki ,SVN or if you have elevated access to the foundation
> servers, or if you've made 400 posts to the foundation's lists, or if
> you've billed more than 400 hours to the WMF, you can vote".

Perhaps just make a rule that says "The election committee can
enfranchise anyone else who doesn't fulfil this limit but has
contributed to the community, at their discretion", and provide some
guidelines? Means we don't need to worry about a barrage of additional
special-case groups...

--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray [at] dunelm

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pathoschild at gmail

Jun 2, 2008, 1:39 PM

Post #9 of 21 (887 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

Andrew Gray <shimgray [at] gmail> wrote:
> Perhaps just make a rule that says "The election committee can
> enfranchise anyone else who doesn't fulfil this limit but has
> contributed to the community, at their discretion", and provide some
> guidelines? Means we don't need to worry about a barrage of additional
> special-case groups...
>

I think it's a bad idea to have a group of users arbitrarily pick who
gets to vote. Any lack of checks and balances leads to temptation to
decide exceptions depending on how much one likes a particular person.
Even someone with stringent moral character will necessarily make
subjective decisions, and then need spend a lot of time defending
those subjective decisions from community members who reach a
different subjective decision.

There should be specific public criteria published before the
elections start and applied objectively to all users (as is current
practice). Unfortunately, community participation is notoriously
difficult to measure.

--
Yours cordially,
Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)

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ktc at ktchan

Jun 2, 2008, 3:23 PM

Post #10 of 21 (889 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 14:38 -0500, Austin Hair wrote:

> On 29 May, when I had planned a nice weekend of editing ahead of me, I
> was told that the cutoff for recent edits had been changed from 1 June
> to that day. Interpreting "between 01 January and 29 May 2008" to
> mean "from 2008-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2008-05-29 23:59:59 UTC," I made
> a smattering of edits and just barely made it in, or so I thought.
>
> Unfortunately, the definition of "between" being used for the purpose
> of suffrage is rather different, so it looks like I won't be voting
> this year.

On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 15:50 -0400, Nathan wrote:
> I don't remember seeing a notice in an update from Pathoschild that
> the eligibility requirements had experienced a second date change. Did
> I miss it?

The 50 edits date was between 03-01 to 05-31 (23:59) initially. This was
extended back as announced to 01-01. We then realised the eligible list
of voters would need time to generate, so the end date was pushed back
to 05-29.

To be honest, when I proposed it, I had intended & interpreted the 05-29
to be inclusive of that day as well. Unfortunately, that wasn't what was
updated to on meta election pages, and subsequently implemented
(correctly according to the election pages) by Tim.

:(

KTC

--
Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
- Heinrich Heine

Attachments:

signature.asc (0.18 KB)

ktc at ktchan

Jun 2, 2008, 3:27 PM

Post #11 of 21 (888 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 21:30 +0700, Waerth wrote:
> It is impossible for me to vote unfortunately ..... I keep on getting
> the message:
>
> Your Wikimedia user ID could not be determined. Please log in to the
> wiki where you are qualified to vote, and go to [[Special:Boardvote]].
> You must use an account with at least 600 contributions before 00:00, 1
> March 2008, and have made at least 50 contributions between 00:00, 1
> January 2008 and 00:00, 29 May 2008.
>
> I am logged into nl.wikipedia, but I registered with SUL recently.

Can you just check again? Waerth [at] nlwik is definitely included in the
list of voters. We had some issue for nl.wp on the first day due to an
interesting indef. block of localhost there. If you had attempted it
then, that could explain why. Also please make sure your browser is
accepting cookies from https://wikimedia.spi-inc.org/ .

Regards,

KTC

--
Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
- Heinrich Heine

Attachments:

signature.asc (0.18 KB)

waerth at asianet

Jun 2, 2008, 11:15 PM

Post #12 of 21 (881 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

For the record, I was able to vote now .....

But I do find the requirements odd.

I have more than 29.000 edits on nl. alone, I used to be an admin on
multiple projects, I used to be a steward, I have done a couple of
things behind the scenes. I am just a lot less active now. And that
might have cost me my right to vote?? So I support Jimmy on this!

Waerth

> :-(
>
> I think we should in the future do away with edit-based suffrage
> requirements in favor of something else. First, being an editor with N
> edits is hardly what we are really looking for... what we are looking
> for is "responsible people actually associated with our community".
> Second, there are many of those people who, like Austin or some of the
> developers, are unable to vote because they have been doing other
> incredibly useful stuff.
>
> I would almost go so far as to say that suffrage should go to project
> admins, completely ignoring edit count.
>
> But this is just a random thought passing through my head at this
> moment, so please don't freak out on me. :)
>
> Austin Hair wrote:
>
>> Unfortunately, I've been so busy chairing the Chapters Committee,
>> administering the Foundation mailing list, and sorting through a few
>> hundred Wikimania scholarship applications that I haven't had much
>> time to edit Wikipedia lately.
>>
>> On 29 May, when I had planned a nice weekend of editing ahead of me, I
>> was told that the cutoff for recent edits had been changed from 1 June
>> to that day. Interpreting "between 01 January and 29 May 2008" to
>> mean "from 2008-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2008-05-29 23:59:59 UTC," I made
>> a smattering of edits and just barely made it in, or so I thought.
>>
>> Unfortunately, the definition of "between" being used for the purpose
>> of suffrage is rather different, so it looks like I won't be voting
>> this year.
>>
>> Austin
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l [at] lists
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l [at] lists
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
>

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waerth at asianet

Jun 2, 2008, 11:18 PM

Post #13 of 21 (881 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

It worked the 6th time I tried :)

Waerth
> On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 21:30 +0700, Waerth wrote:
>
>> It is impossible for me to vote unfortunately ..... I keep on getting
>> the message:
>>
>> Your Wikimedia user ID could not be determined. Please log in to the
>> wiki where you are qualified to vote, and go to [[Special:Boardvote]].
>> You must use an account with at least 600 contributions before 00:00, 1
>> March 2008, and have made at least 50 contributions between 00:00, 1
>> January 2008 and 00:00, 29 May 2008.
>>
>> I am logged into nl.wikipedia, but I registered with SUL recently.
>>
>
> Can you just check again? Waerth [at] nlwik is definitely included in the
> list of voters. We had some issue for nl.wp on the first day due to an
> interesting indef. block of localhost there. If you had attempted it
> then, that could explain why. Also please make sure your browser is
> accepting cookies from https://wikimedia.spi-inc.org/ .
>
> Regards,
>
> KTC
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l [at] lists
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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notafishz at gmail

Jun 3, 2008, 2:03 AM

Post #14 of 21 (882 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 10:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell [at] gmail> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwales [at] wikia> wrote:

>> I would almost go so far as to say that suffrage should go to project
>> admins, completely ignoring edit count.
>
> Adminship is politicized on all the larger projects, causing a lot of
> experienced, competent, deeply invested users to have zero interest in
> adminship. It's a mismatch.
[snip]

I agree with Greg here.

> For developers/sysadmins/meta-pedians you could simply create an
> additional rule as was done for staff. I don't think many people would
> object to a rule making that that says "If you have SVN checkin to the
> mediawiki ,SVN or if you have elevated access to the foundation
> servers, or if you've made 400 posts to the foundation's lists, or if
> you've billed more than 400 hours to the WMF, you can vote".

How about keeping some kind of edit count (ie. minimum X edits
altogether but no time limit) and then having an opt-in option?

In short, in order to have the right to vote, you must express your
interest in voting *before* the election. That is, for example, a
month before the candidates are asked to submit their platforms, you
have a projects-wide announcement that calls for a voting pool. "If
you're interested, please enroll today in the voting lists".

Just a thought,

Delphine
(who is also *not* allowed to vote on any public wiki :( - but I got other ways)
--
~notafish

NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. For Wikimedia
related correspondence, use my dmenard(at)wikimedia(point)org address.

http://blog.notanendive.org

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wiki.ral315 at gmail

Jun 3, 2008, 7:38 AM

Post #15 of 21 (876 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell [at] gmail> wrote:

> Adminship is politicized on all the larger projects, causing a lot of
> experienced, competent, deeply invested users to have zero interest in
> adminship. It's a mismatch.
>
> The point of the edit count limit is to include all regular editors
> not just a cabal, but to add some friction against someone minting a
> lot of sock accounts. Its fine that it includes a few crazy people,
> since they should be offset by the large number of fairly sane people.
>

I don't think that including administrators is a problem so long as we
include non-administrators as well. But that doesn't mean we can't give
administrators a little boost, like saying "you don't have to get the 50
edits" or whatever it may be. Cabalism worries aside, administrators are
trusted users, and that's really the only metric to test whether a user is
"trusted". I think that trusted users should get the benefit of the doubt
regarding activity.

For future elections, I'd change the "X edits since January 1" to instead
reflect "X edits since June 31 of last year", which gives more leeway. I'd
also add in the following additions to suffrage (pick any or all):

* Adminship on any project, combined with the 600 edits, gives a user voting
rights. This requires admins to have been active once, but ensures that
users who we know are trusted and valuable members of the community can vote
regardless of their activity in the prior 6-12 months.

* Membership on any Wikimedia board, committee, or on OTRS. No edit count
requirements.

* Any developers, chosen by the Chief Technical Officer (brion) who have
shown sufficient dedication to the project that he feels they deserve
suffrage. I'm not sure if there are any devs like this who don't already
make it by edit count, or because they have shell access, but this could
conceivably come up.

* I don't know how we would develop a metric for mailing list suffrage, and
I'm not sure it's ideal to do so. Open to suggestions, of course, but I'm
not sure "X posts" is a good metric.

Anyone who meets these requirements could petition the Committee up until
about a week before the election, and they would be added to the valid voter
list prior to voting starting.

Let's remember, of course, that those denied suffrage are a small minority
of the community. They're of course a very valid part of the community, and
I think we should try to fix this situation, but this is not, for example,
likely to affect the election significantly, and certainly it won't affect
the fairness of the election.

--
[[User:Ral315]]
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geo.plrd at yahoo

Jun 3, 2008, 8:07 AM

Post #16 of 21 (876 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

I cannot support a requirement of adminship. That would disenfranchise a significant portion of the community.

----- Original Message ----
From: Ryan <wiki.ral315 [at] gmail>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l [at] lists>
Sent: Tuesday, June 3, 2008 7:38:44 AM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Unable to vote

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell [at] gmail> wrote:

> Adminship is politicized on all the larger projects, causing a lot of
> experienced, competent, deeply invested users to have zero interest in
> adminship. It's a mismatch.
>
> The point of the edit count limit is to include all regular editors
> not just a cabal, but to add some friction against someone minting a
> lot of sock accounts. Its fine that it includes a few crazy people,
> since they should be offset by the large number of fairly sane people.
>

I don't think that including administrators is a problem so long as we
include non-administrators as well. But that doesn't mean we can't give
administrators a little boost, like saying "you don't have to get the 50
edits" or whatever it may be. Cabalism worries aside, administrators are
trusted users, and that's really the only metric to test whether a user is
"trusted". I think that trusted users should get the benefit of the doubt
regarding activity.

For future elections, I'd change the "X edits since January 1" to instead
reflect "X edits since June 31 of last year", which gives more leeway. I'd
also add in the following additions to suffrage (pick any or all):

* Adminship on any project, combined with the 600 edits, gives a user voting
rights. This requires admins to have been active once, but ensures that
users who we know are trusted and valuable members of the community can vote
regardless of their activity in the prior 6-12 months.

* Membership on any Wikimedia board, committee, or on OTRS. No edit count
requirements.

* Any developers, chosen by the Chief Technical Officer (brion) who have
shown sufficient dedication to the project that he feels they deserve
suffrage. I'm not sure if there are any devs like this who don't already
make it by edit count, or because they have shell access, but this could
conceivably come up.

* I don't know how we would develop a metric for mailing list suffrage, and
I'm not sure it's ideal to do so. Open to suggestions, of course, but I'm
not sure "X posts" is a good metric.

Anyone who meets these requirements could petition the Committee up until
about a week before the election, and they would be added to the valid voter
list prior to voting starting.

Let's remember, of course, that those denied suffrage are a small minority
of the community. They're of course a very valid part of the community, and
I think we should try to fix this situation, but this is not, for example,
likely to affect the election significantly, and certainly it won't affect
the fairness of the election.

--
[[User:Ral315]]
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wiki.ral315 at gmail

Jun 3, 2008, 8:56 AM

Post #17 of 21 (875 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 11:07 AM, Geoffrey Plourde <geo.plrd [at] yahoo>
wrote:

> I cannot support a requirement of adminship. That would disenfranchise a
> significant portion of the community.
>

I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. My suggestion would be that
non-admins would have to have X edits, and Y edits in the last 30 days.
Administrators would have to have X edits, but the second requirement would
not apply.

--
[[User:Ral315]]
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innocentkiller at gmail

Jun 3, 2008, 8:58 AM

Post #18 of 21 (875 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 11:07 AM, Geoffrey Plourde <geo.plrd [at] yahoo> wrote:
> I cannot support a requirement of adminship. That would disenfranchise a significant portion of the community.
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Ryan <wiki.ral315 [at] gmail>
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l [at] lists>
> Sent: Tuesday, June 3, 2008 7:38:44 AM
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Unable to vote
>
> On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell [at] gmail> wrote:
>
>> Adminship is politicized on all the larger projects, causing a lot of
>> experienced, competent, deeply invested users to have zero interest in
>> adminship. It's a mismatch.
>>
>> The point of the edit count limit is to include all regular editors
>> not just a cabal, but to add some friction against someone minting a
>> lot of sock accounts. Its fine that it includes a few crazy people,
>> since they should be offset by the large number of fairly sane people.
>>
>
> I don't think that including administrators is a problem so long as we
> include non-administrators as well. But that doesn't mean we can't give
> administrators a little boost, like saying "you don't have to get the 50
> edits" or whatever it may be. Cabalism worries aside, administrators are
> trusted users, and that's really the only metric to test whether a user is
> "trusted". I think that trusted users should get the benefit of the doubt
> regarding activity.
>
> For future elections, I'd change the "X edits since January 1" to instead
> reflect "X edits since June 31 of last year", which gives more leeway. I'd
> also add in the following additions to suffrage (pick any or all):
>
> * Adminship on any project, combined with the 600 edits, gives a user voting
> rights. This requires admins to have been active once, but ensures that
> users who we know are trusted and valuable members of the community can vote
> regardless of their activity in the prior 6-12 months.
>
> * Membership on any Wikimedia board, committee, or on OTRS. No edit count
> requirements.
>
> * Any developers, chosen by the Chief Technical Officer (brion) who have
> shown sufficient dedication to the project that he feels they deserve
> suffrage. I'm not sure if there are any devs like this who don't already
> make it by edit count, or because they have shell access, but this could
> conceivably come up.
>
> * I don't know how we would develop a metric for mailing list suffrage, and
> I'm not sure it's ideal to do so. Open to suggestions, of course, but I'm
> not sure "X posts" is a good metric.
>
> Anyone who meets these requirements could petition the Committee up until
> about a week before the election, and they would be added to the valid voter
> list prior to voting starting.
>
> Let's remember, of course, that those denied suffrage are a small minority
> of the community. They're of course a very valid part of the community, and
> I think we should try to fix this situation, but this is not, for example,
> likely to affect the election significantly, and certainly it won't affect
> the fairness of the election.
>
> --
> [[User:Ral315]]
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>
>
>
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>

Not to mention, sysops+friends screams of cabalism...

-Chad

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saintonge at telus

Jun 3, 2008, 11:24 AM

Post #19 of 21 (871 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

Delphine M�nard wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 10:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
>> For developers/sysadmins/meta-pedians you could simply create an
>> additional rule as was done for staff. I don't think many people would
>> object to a rule making that that says "If you have SVN checkin to the
>> mediawiki ,SVN or if you have elevated access to the foundation
>> servers, or if you've made 400 posts to the foundation's lists, or if
>> you've billed more than 400 hours to the WMF, you can vote".
>>
> How about keeping some kind of edit count (ie. minimum X edits
> altogether but no time limit) and then having an opt-in option?
>
The two types of edit count serve two different functions, and if there
are other ways of answering those questions that's fine. The long term
edit count expresses some degree of commitment rather than drive-by
activity. The 600 figure seems somewhat arbitrary, but so would a
larger or smaller figure. The short term figure answers the question,
"Are you still alive?" Even one edit during the specified time might be
enough for this, as could evidence of other useful activity within that
same time.
> In short, in order to have the right to vote, you must express your
> interest in voting *before* the election. That is, for example, a
> month before the candidates are asked to submit their platforms, you
> have a projects-wide announcement that calls for a voting pool. "If
> you're interested, please enroll today in the voting lists".
I don't think that will work. However many such announcements you make
there will always be a large number complaining that they were never
notified that an election was coming. You can put deadlines on
candidate submissions since anyone who isn't clueful enough to figure
that out probably shouldn't be a candidate in the first place. Voters
are a different matter.

Ec

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thomas.dalton at gmail

Jun 3, 2008, 1:01 PM

Post #20 of 21 (874 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

> The short term figure answers the question,
> "Are you still alive?" Even one edit during the specified time might be
> enough for this, as could evidence of other useful activity within that
> same time.

If that's the case, you could just consider voting itself to be a
useful activity and do away with the requirement. My understanding is
that the short term figure is there is make sure you are a current
member of the community, not just a former member. (I'm not saying
former members shouldn't be able to vote, I'm undecided on that point,
I'm just giving my interpretation of the rules as they stand.)

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pathoschild at gmail

Jun 3, 2008, 1:48 PM

Post #21 of 21 (879 views)
Permalink

Re: Unable to vote [In reply to]

Please also post suggestions at
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Board_elections/2009>, so next
year's committee can keep track of them. (This discussion will
eventually fade away and get lost in the archives.)

--
Yours cordially,
Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)

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