On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 3:46 PM, Dan Rosenthal swatjester@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 1:41 AM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
600 edits is simple. It equates to about 10 hours worth of copy and pasting on English Wikisource; a task any novice could do. The same can be achieved in a few hours with AWB on Wikipedia (although the tasks to perform are a bit harder to find these day on English Wikipedia), or a few days on New page patrol. On Commons, [[Category:Media needing categories as of 18 November 2007]] has 425 images, which could be mostly cleared with a few hours using the HotCat Gadget.
Again why editcount-itis is bad.
The suffrage requirement was 600 edits, and 50 in three months. That is not a reasonable example of editcount-itis.
I have around 100 photos in my aperture library that are marked 3 stars or higher. If I upload them all to my flickr account and then use flickr tool to upload them to commons, then for each photo make separate edits for categories, description, data, etc.... you could have 600 edits in a couple of hours.
Most users start off doing these tasks the laborious way. That you can uploading 100 images with a few strokes of your wand doesn't mean you should obtain suffrage after only 10 minutes effort.
The 600 edits is a simple requirement to ensure that a person is still active in a project. It keeps the voting community grounded in doing something useful.
You can take 3 or 4 pages, and make 20 edits to them screwing around with small stuff, moving spaces around, adding individual words or categories, instead of doing it all in bulk.
Maybe, however on many wikis that would swiftly result in guidance, followed by stern warnings, blocks and/or questions in peoples minds.
In short, edit count suffrage requirements, in theory at least, exclude legitimate voters, while not excluding people who want to game the system.
As I explained, anyone can meet the suffrage requirements by simply accepting them as they are, and putting in a few hours on a single wiki. Legitimate voters are those who actually do some real content creation. Even our sysadmins could easily attain this edit requirement without issue by contributing to our computer software and operating system wikibooks. (I mention them as they were a class of extraordinary people mentioned in foundation-l suffrage discussions before this years election period)
Rather than devoting resources to increase flexibility of who should have suffrage, I would rather the time is spent on excluding the likelihood of the system being gamed. Any gaming going on with a 600 edit requirement is likely affecting a real wiki somewhere. If someone is voting twice in board elections, they will likely be voting twice in other issues.
-- John Vandenberg