Every time we've run an election of any kind with emails, to the best of my knowledge, the email has caused a huge jump in participation. This time, sending the email led to an additional 5000 votes overnight, which more than doubled the total vote count. I don't have the numbers to hand, but we saw a similar email-bump in the last board election.

So if the goal is lots of participation, then I think email is warranted. But we just need to iterate and get better at it... as Andrew is indeed working on :)

-- phoebe

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 8:32 AM, Huib Laurens sterkebak@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

Maybe we shouldn't e-mail every user every time there is a vote.

There has never been a run that didn't cause any problems and like Andrew was saying elsewhere they know the system doesn't check for global blocks and multible blocks.

So there will be a lot of false positives. And a lot of people will get spam because they did create a account and did some edits... People that think Wikimedia is sending spam will leave instead of vote.

There is already a global site notice. This e-mails was't needed...

2011/8/19, Andrew Garrett agarrett@wikimedia.org:

...

Hi all,

I've just started sending out over 750,000 emails to folks who are eligible to vote in our Wikimedia Referendum. I've learned from past mailouts in trying to exclude more bots, multiple accounts and folks who've already voted. However, if you receive an email which doesn't apply to you (for example, if you're not eligible to vote, or you've requested to be excluded from such mailouts), or if there's a problem with the email that you receive (for example, it's in the wrong language), I've set up a page [1] where you can report it. Remember that you can always opt out from all future mailings [2].

I'm hoping that having a central page for this information will help in investigating the issues associated with errant mail, and allow future mail to be better targetted.

Thanks a lot for your help,

—Andrew

[1]

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum/Email/False_positives

...

[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_nomail_list

-- Andrew Garrett Wikimedia Foundation agarrett@wikimedia.org

---

foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

-- Verzonden vanaf mijn mobiele apparaat

Kind regards,

Huib Laurens WickedWay.nl

Webhosting the wicked way.

---

foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 9:43 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:

While it is not a big deal for me to get six emails (including one in Polish) instead of once, I want to say that I already added pattern for my bot accounts at the Wikimedia nomail list and it existed at Friday morning there, at least [1].

Sorry, that list doesn't accept regular expressions. It's a straight list of account names, which, until yesterday, had to go through about twenty minutes of preprocessing before it was useful.