New subject: [Foundation-l] Unable to vote

3 Jun 2008

I cannot support a requirement of adminship. That would disenfranchise a significant
portion of the community. 

----- Original Message ----
From: Ryan &lt;wiki.ral315(a)gmail.com&gt;
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List &lt;foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;
Sent: Tuesday, June 3, 2008 7:38:44 AM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Unable to vote

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell &lt;gmaxwell(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

...
  Adminship is politicized on all the larger projects,
causing a lot of
 experienced, competent, deeply invested users to have zero interest in
 adminship.  It's a mismatch.

 The point of the edit count limit is to include all regular editors
 not just a cabal, but to add some friction against someone minting a
 lot of sock accounts. Its fine that it includes a few crazy people,
 since they should be offset by the large number of fairly sane people.

I don't think that including administrators is a problem so long as we
include non-administrators as well.  But that doesn't mean we can't give
administrators a little boost, like saying "you don't have to get the 50
edits" or whatever it may be.  Cabalism worries aside, administrators are
trusted users, and that's really the only metric to test whether a user is
"trusted".  I think that trusted users should get the benefit of the doubt
regarding activity.

For future elections, I'd change the "X edits since January 1" to instead
reflect "X edits since June 31 of last year", which gives more leeway.  I'd
also add in the following additions to suffrage (pick any or all):

* Adminship on any project, combined with the 600 edits, gives a user voting
rights.  This requires admins to have been active once, but ensures that
users who we know are trusted and valuable members of the community can vote
regardless of their activity in the prior 6-12 months.

* Membership on any Wikimedia board, committee, or on OTRS.  No edit count
requirements.

* Any developers, chosen by the Chief Technical Officer (brion) who have
shown sufficient dedication to the project that he feels they deserve
suffrage.  I'm not sure if there are any devs like this who don't already
make it by edit count, or because they have shell access, but this could
conceivably come up.

* I don't know how we would develop a metric for mailing list suffrage, and
I'm not sure it's ideal to do so.  Open to suggestions, of course, but I'm
not sure "X posts" is a good metric.

Anyone who meets these requirements could petition the Committee up until
about a week before the election, and they would be added to the valid voter
list prior to voting starting.

Let's remember, of course, that those denied suffrage are a small minority
of the community.  They're of course a very valid part of the community, and
I think we should try to fix this situation, but this is not, for example,
likely to affect the election significantly, and certainly it won't affect
the fairness of the election.

-- 
[[User:Ral315]]
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