On 04/05/06, John Tex <johntexster(a)gmail.com> wrote: The discussion was about AfD votes. You talk about "influencing policy". Do you include AfD votes as a special case of "influencing policy", then? Steve

There's a fine line between "asking other interested people to participate" and "attempting to stack a vote". The first practice is just fine, I think. The second is not. How to tell the different between them? I don't know of a good criteria that would ever work in all cases. But usually the difference is fairly obvious: when the people "coming to the discussion" do no discussing (they just throw a vote in, or write some pithy comment about how the other people are crazy/wrong/stupid/whatever), it looks a lot like vote stacking to me. Additionally when the solicitation for other eyes is along the lines of "Come vote on this, these guys are trying to delete our favorite article!" it is usually quite telling. And when people who have never edited on Wikipedia are drawn into it, it is obviously vote stacking. Consulting others is not a problem. Writing to people and saying, "I'd like it if you'd weigh in on this," is great practice. Especially when the people consulted are thoughtful and will even on occasion disagree with the person who had solicited them! All the better. Calling in pals who will just add a vote and show no real engagement with the reasoning or discussion going on, people who have no investment in Wikipedia as a whole and no experience with the project? Not good, not helpful, not the right way to do things. Drawing the line is hard primarily in theory. It is not usually that hard in practice to spot the difference, though, because instances of "meatpuppetry" are usually pretty transparent, in my experience. FF On 5/4/06, John Tex <johntexster(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, 4 May 2006 08:57:15 -0700, you wrote: A right? Perhaps I missed that. I thought the only rights were to fork or to leave. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG