IANAL but I doubt it. Such norms, on whatever level tend to focus only on formal employment and access to services aimed at the general public. You're free to cast votes on politicians (and board members, for that matter) based on solely religious (or gender or whatever) grounds. I consider rfas rather analogous, with regards to individual cast votes. If the entire community turns strictly anti-Semitic or anti-LGBT or pro-White or whatever, or if a bureaucrat closes votes on such grounds, that's something else. Michael On 9/26/08, Joe Szilagyi <szilagyi(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Michael Bimmler mbimmler(a)gmail.com

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Joe Szilagyi <szilagyi(a)gmail.com> wrote: It's a community thing. On en.wikibooks, our bureaucrats simply won't pay attention to irrational and poorly supported votes. Bureaucrats are able to use their judgement to consider the quality of votes above the sheer quantity of them. As a nice side effect, since we reformulated our policies to make this point explicit, we've not seen any serious amounts of sockpuppeting or vote stuffing (because more votes doesn't help). Of course, giving so much freedom of judgement to a bureaucrat can be a little scary, and the community at en.wb has been very selective about new bureaucrats (from what I understand, WP is a little selective about it as well). I suggest to WP that there is nothing wrong with only allowing "reasonable votes" from "reasonable voters", with some members (bureaucrats?) trusted to differentiate between the two. Unfortunately, I dont think this really is a problem with discrimination laws. Think about how the Boy Scouts have generally disallowed homosexuals from participating in their programs. The Boy Scouts don't get in serious trouble over these issues, although they have lost access to some specific deals that they had with local governments (lower taxes, lower rent, etc). This isn't the first issue of RfA discrimination I've heard of over at WP, age-related discrimination has been discussed all over the blogosphere. What's unfortunate is that WP has been allowing such votes to carry the same weight as votes which are made with proper consideration paid to a user's edit history. The community has certain standards when selecting new admins, and users who aren't voting with those standards in mind arne't really participating in the process. --Andrew Whitworth