[Foundation-l] How was the "only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote" rule decided?

[Kwan Ting Chan]

You know, this comes up every year. And there's always good argument to 
both sides but there's never consensus to actually change it. There has 
been an election in one form or another since 2004, and except in 2004 
where the requirement was having an account that is at least 3 months 
old or be a sysop on a project that is less than 3 months old (hey, 
Wikimedia *was* new after all :D), there has been an edit requirement to 
vote. Between 2005 to 2007, a voter was required to have had made at 
least 400 edits to a particular project (by roughly a month before 
voting) and be at least 3 months old. Last year, the requirement were 
raised to 600 edits by 3 months prior and 50 edits any time in the 
previous 6 months with exceptions granted to server administrators, paid 
staff of at least 3 months old, and current or former trustees. This 
year the requirement were relaxed slightly such that the 600 edits can 
be made up to 2 months prior, and with unified accounts combined votes 
across projects.

At the end of the day, what form the suffrage requirements take depends 
on what group of people we want making that decision. Is it on one 
extreme the end user of the product, i.e. the readers of Wikipedia, 
Wikinews, etc...? Is it on the other extreme only people the editing 
community has decided to entrust with additional privileges, i.e. 
sysops? Or perhaps only people who have supported the projects in the 
form of monetary contributions? Or somewhere in between the two extreme, 
as we have now.

Once that has been decided, the technical means of restricting voters to 
only that group of people can be arrived at, hopefully relatively 
easily. X number of edits by Y time is just a method of restricting 
suffrage to the group of people we want. It's a waste of time arguing X 
should be Z, or edits should include mailing list posting (which mailing 
list?), MediaWiki commits, Bugzilla bug tickets, ... We could spend all 
day doing it. Instead of arguing over the method of restriction, define 
who we want to restrict it to first.

KTC

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