On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 4:45 PM, phoebe ayersphoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Dear everyone, As a reminder, we also discussed suffrage requirements on this list last year: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-April/042105.html
As a response to concerns over the proposed requirement that there be 50 edits between April and June before the election, this period was lengthened to January to June, and now here we are.
It might help to have a list of tricky subjects worthy of steady discussion and improvement. We don't have much of a general philosophy of suffrage (we already have a number of somewhat arbitrary exceptions, and certainly early wiki contributors would have hated the idea of edit count being used as any measure of dedication), and it's important enough to be worth more than the occasional email thread.
I don't take issue with that element of the requirements, but I do think we are excluding smaller projects, where each contribution takes more time and it is rare to have any qualified voters who aren't running bots. (why should bot-runners get special recognition? Is it truly such a valuable task to add batches of stubs?)
A future request : It would be handy if the election tool redirected ineligible voters to a place where they can share their priorities and thoughts, at least to the tune of a short paragraph. 'Ineligible to vote' makes people sad, and should not mean 'unqualified to contribute to the future of the projects'.
SJ