Before I start, can I just point out these exact same issues was discussed on this list during the last Board election 2 years ago....
On 14/06/2011 16:38, Casey Brown wrote:
On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 8:37 AM, Andrew Garrettagarrett@wikimedia.org wrote:
- I already voted. It may be a good idea to send this only to people
who didn't.
I don't think this is possible.
I think Pathoschild did it in the past and he was able to remove people who voted already, who didn't meet requirements, who were bots, etc.
Well, I was the one who sent the email back in 2008. Pathoschild (I believe) was the committee member who took on the action to get it sent in 2009, but I think it was Werdna that actually sent it.
It would be a good idea for someone to make a list of things that need to be done/were done to make your job easier in the future. Pathoschild, do you remember what was done in the past? Could you start such a list? :-)
And I wrote precisely such email to this list 2 years ago.... http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/053798.html
In 2008, one of the sysadmin build a filter list of accounts matching the edit requirements, from which all blocked & bot flagged account was removed to create the list of eligible voters. For the email list, all accounts with no or obviously invalid entry for email address was removed, and (this was pre-SUL) home project was chosen for accounts sharing the same email address by picking the account with the most edits, preferring language specific project over multi-language one (e.g. Commons).
And just before I started sending the emails, I took out those emails corresponding to accounts that had voted up to that point. Obviously, with such an approach, those that voted after I looked up the voted list still got an email but it eliminated most people that voted already getting an email.
KTC
/me wait another 2 years to see if it makes any difference