On Jul 14, 2007, at 11:19 AM, Delirium wrote:
These relate, I think, to the question of what exactly
the community
*is*. The core group of the community are probably people who: 1) are
committed to Wikimedia's core goals (though they may disagree on some
matters); and 2) spend significant time and effort working towards
those
goals. But that's a pretty abstract definition, and you can't make
voting eligibility based on that too easily. Our current
approximation
is "people who've edited a Wikimedia project at least a little
bit", but
that isn't really the same thing. As our projects get more and more
popular, an increasing percentage of the total internet population
will
be eligible to vote under current rules, and "anyone who's ever edited
Wikipedia" will start to look less and less like any sort of
community.
It'd also make us susceptible to outside advertising campaigns, as
someone wanting to influence the Foundation would just need to rally
some otherwise inactive account-holders to rediscover their
accounts and
vote.
I agree completely. If we feel there was low turnout in this
election, I think one possible solution would be better
notification... and this has been discussed extensively already. But
*another* thing to think about is whether we have defined voter
eligibility much too broadly. I think we mostly do not want the
board of the foundation elected by casual users or the general
public, but by "the core group of the community" .. which is of
course hard to define, but probably means more than just making a
small number of edits at some point in time.
--Jimbo