On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote: The second sentence should read: There is no information in the current heuristic that indicates that editors who are allowed to vote are more or less familiar with the candidates than those who are not.

I have no opinion on whether the rule should exist, but it is something that deserves to be looked at. There are valid reasons for requiring a minimum recent edit count, of course, but perhaps there are better ways to handle it. The rules did disenfranchise me, for example. It doesn't bother me that I can't vote, but that said, I would've liked to vote if eligible. I am not active on Wikipedia, but I do follow the mailing lists, and have followed the election process. If I really wanted to, I could've racked up 50 edits to get a vote, but that almost seems "dirty", I guess, to make edits just to regain eligibility for the election. My thought is that there may be other ways to enfranchise users who are clearly community members, but who for some reason or another are inactive on the projects themselves. What those ways are, I don't know. One thought: If the only, or at least the major reason that we're doing this is to avoid fraud, users with "committed identities" - encrypted messages on their user page as a way to verify their identity in case an account is stolen - could be re-enfranchised on a case-by-case basis if they can provide the passphrase. On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: -- [[User:Ral315]]

Hello, On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Milos Rancic<millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote: Thank you; this sentence made my day. -- Guillaume Paumier [[m:User:guillom]]

Hoi, When we have consensus on that one, someone has to count them.. So what piority do we give it and, what do we bumb down the list ? Alternatively who is volunteering to write the necessary software anyway and how are we going to get it operational ?? PS I like the idea <grin> Thanks, GerardM 2009/7/31 Milos Rancic &lt;millosh(a)gmail.com&gt;

Hoi, When it is agreed that people can vote based on their mail contributions, the one thing necessary is connecting people to their WMF user. When this information is available on a user, the global user may be made known as a voter. In my opinion you do not want to involve people when there is no need. Automate what can be automated and through a link to a user it can be automated. While I agree that this makes sense, I doubt very much that many people will have a vote as a result of this and even more, I doubt people will cast their vote because they can in this way. Thanks, GerardM 2009/7/31 John Vandenberg &lt;jayvdb(a)gmail.com&gt;

And what about the people reading all the mail of all the mailing list, they know Wikimedia damn, they too should be allowed to vote. And the people making donations, they're supporting the projects too, they should get a vote. Or not. I'm not fond of the idea. Contributors to the project elect part of the board. If you don't meet the criteria then you can't vote. You need a solid and strong criteria, I don't think the number of sent mails is one. Cheers, Christophe Envoye depuis mon Blackberry -----Original Message----- From: John Vandenberg &lt;jayvdb(a)gmail.com&gt; Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:07:00 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List&lt;foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] How was the "only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote" rule decided? On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 7:52 PM, Gerard Meijssen&lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: It is for this reason that it would be extra-ordinary. Most people who send email to foundation-l would meet the normal suffrage requirements. All I am saying is that _if_ we do agree that emails should be counted as edits, *I* can count them or publish stats that allow others to more easily count them. We have the technology. Do we have the need? Each year there are people who should have suffrage that do not. If I remember correctly, last year the techies were allowed to vote even if they didnt meet the edit criteria. We should learn from the previous elections, and have a panel that reviews extra-ordinary cases. It is worth the effort. -- John Vandenberg _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 1:52 AM, Ryan Lomonaco&lt;wiki.ral315(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: One way could be to have chapters maintain lists of users linked to real identities. Although that might gum up the works for "pink" chapters that do not intend to become legal organizations. -Sage

Right on. I detect ageism supplementing the recentism. But seriously folks, if fraud were the issue then confirmed identify would overcome the problem. The number-of-recent-edits criterion has two effects that bother me. 1. It effectively puts the vote firmly in the hands of producers not consumers. 2. It effectively discriminates against those with RSI or who are otherwise impaired The first phenomenon is basic. We know damned lilttle about our users and often seem to care less. Perhaps having a little more representation would tilt toward responsiveness to the user base. As important as editors are, I can see at the project level how their interests just don't seem very responsive to users I have been appalled at some of the displays of attitude toward users ("imbeciles" etc.) The default set up of our wikis limits the ability of many with content knowledge or enthusiasm to contribute in any satisfying way. To entrench those who have encouraged keeping projects as sandboxes they share with the like-minded seems very pernicious to Wikimedia as a movement. I think the Bolsheviks need to have less influence. On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: -- Dennis C. During Cynolatry is tolerant so long as the dog is not denied an equal divinity with the deities of other faiths. - Ambrose Bierce http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cynolatry

Brian wrote: Actually, the general case with Wikimedia, at least from my experience, is that consensus are required to make a major change, not to maintain the status quo. Having an edit requirement of some form *is* the status quo, as I pointed out in my earlier email. Anyway, that's not how things work with the board election for WMF anyway. At the end of the day, despite what we might want, WMF is not a membership organization. And who get to be on the board is determined by its bylaws. The bylaws, which may be updated any time by the board states "The Board of Trustees shall determine the dates, rules and regulation of the voting procedures, which, beginning in 2009, shall take place in odd-numbered years. The Board shall determine who is qualified to vote for community-selected Trustees.". In practice, the board delegating this responsibility to a number of community members who forms the election community, while of course maintaining final approval / veto power over the committee's decisions. And from experience, I can tell you the reality of establishing the rules work by starting from last year, and updating or modifying based on feedbacks. And that mean, given no strong community consensus to change our present form of requiring some form of edit requirement, having that requirement. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

Philippe Beaudette wrote: LOL, how many have you been on now? :P There's no (planned) election next year, I don't think *anyone* is planning on volunteering for a committee that won't exist. ;-) KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

Brian wrote: I'm going to take particular issue with the last point here. On 3 June *2008*, right after last year election, Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild), one of last year election committee member, posted on the talk page of either Election 2009 or election 2008 (and subsequently merged with this year) "If you have an idea on how to improve the 2008 board elections system for 2009, please post them below under a section name that briefly summarizes the subject". Philippe posted this year rules on this mailing list on 27 May. It has always been the case that election committee will take any feedback or concern expressed and change the rules based on those concern if needed. Example of that happened last year when the recent edit over last 3 months requirement was added and subsequently modified based on feedback to last 6 months. This year, the period of candidate presentation was extended significantly, right up to the start of the election, again based on feedback here on this mailing list. You can't complain that the election committee don't take on board new ideas or feedbacks if you haven't expressed it before the election started. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

On Jul 31, 2009, at 1:13 PM, Brian wrote: Really? Been to the strategic planning wiki lately? There's a whole big section there asking for proposals from the community. :-) Philippe

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 2:51 PM, Philippe Beaudette&lt;pbeaudette(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: Right. I sympathize with both Brian and Philippe here. There are those who want the Foundation to take a more active role in facilitating discussion, even from those who are apathetic or shy about discussing policy; they also want the Foundation to make decisions based on thorough community input. They feel that the Foundation is acting on the limited input given, and fooling itself that this is a functional way to survey a broad and underrepresented community. There are also those who feel the Foundation is open and encouraging public discourse, but there aren't many community members contributing to the discussion. They want the community to take a more active role in discussions and to start new ones where they don't exist, and to be bold with ideas about change; they also want the Foundation to make bold decisions where none has been proposed, and to make steady progress. They feel the community is not very communal, and needs guidance when a complex topic arises to overcome a tendency towards flame wars - or should be left out of discussions requiring expertise altogether. I am somewhere in-between. On critical complex topics, the Foundation could benefit from more discussion and better planning. Why have we made it so hard to start new Projects? When did we acquire 8 million dollars in annual upkeep? Where are metrics of site popularity, public citation, and reuse (for all projects, not just Wikipedia) in measures of the Foundation's success? These topics are not generally on the table; occasionally we get PR instead of detailed answers; and regularly people say things such as "I don't post to foundation-l [because it's not a friendly enough environment / it is full of hot air]". If you ever find yourself saying that about a canonical place for discussion of community-wide issues, you've run into a deep problem that you should address publicly and immediately. On critical planning topics, the community has the ball in its own court -- a healthy foundation, hundreds of thousands of active supporters, worldwide acclaim, and the authority to chart its own course. And so far, many of its good planners are looking elsewhere and saying "I think you have the ball." Perhaps local factions and detailed policy-making have won out over larger-scope planning; perhaps even the most active community members don't realize the position they are in to contribute to long-term discussions -- such as how to define membership, suffrage, community engagement. But if you find yourself spending more time writing eloquent challenges to authority than proposing better solutions, you should stop and consider whether you can just fix what needs fixing. Sj

2009/8/1 Erik Moeller &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt;rg>: Commons could do this tomorrow if the blender file type was allowed. -- geni

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 9:09 PM, Erik Moeller&lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: Yes. I was thinking particularly of Wikikids and Wikifamily (Rodovid), which are useful for significant audiences, implementable in an elegant way, about creating and sharing collections of free knowledge, and have existing multilingual communities. I don't know if they still need support of any kind, but their proposals for Wikimedia hosting remain. +1 What would this look like? Also... *A wiki for book metadata, with an entry for every published work, statistics about its use and siblings, and discussion about its usefulness as a citation (a collaboration with OpenLibrary, merging WikiCite ideas) Sj

On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 3:32 AM, John Vandenberg&lt;jayvdb(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip> Not so. More printed works have been published in the last 70 years than the whole of human history preceding them. -Robert Rohde

Andrew Gray wrote: Intuitively, I think your analysis is closer to reality, but, even so, that older 30% is more than enough to keep us all busy for a very long time. To appreciate the size of the task consider the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. It is well in the public domain, and most articles there have a small number of sources which themselves would be in the public domain. Only a small portion of the 1911 EB project on Wikisource is complete to acceptable standards; we have virtually nothing from EB's sources; we also have virtually nothing from any other edition of the EB even though everything up to the early 14th (pre 1946) is already in the public domain. Dealing with this alone is a huge task. Having all this bibliography on Wikisource is conceivable, though properly not in the Wikisource of any one language; that would be consistent with my own original vision of Wikisource from the very first day. A good bibliographic survey of a work should reference all editions and all translations of a work. For an author, multiply this by the number of his works. Paradoxically, Wikisource, like Wikipedia and like many another mature projects, has made a virtue of obsessive minute accuracy and uniformity. While we all treasure accuracy, its pursuit can be subject to diminishing returns. A bigger Wikisource community could in theory overcome this, but the process of acculturation that goes on in mature wiki projects makes this unlikely. Sam's reference to "book metadata" is itself an underestimate of the challenge. It doesn't even touch on journal articles, or other material too short to warrant the publication of a monograph. Ec

I could see this happening on Wikisource. I mention it as another project because it would eventually involve importing and organizing freely available metadata on roughly ten million books, and defining a style guide for helping organizing citations and comments about each as a source -- very different from the current work going on at WS. We need to publicly think about what each of the Projects will look like when they fully cover their scope... or at a few major milestones along the way. That view would also help define what long-term notability standards will look like for projects that currently reject free knowledge about certain topics. John V writes: It's closer to only 10% that is free/libre -- the rate of publishing has been growing geometrically for a number of decades, and it's the last 85 years for some texts. --SJ On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 6:32 AM, John Vandenberg&lt;jayvdb(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

If you're thinking of _this_ Rodovid http://en.rodovid.org/ (frontend is http://rodovid.org/) I would strongly vote for that. It's really is and In fact it's implemented already though development is going on (as never ending process). I would say that there is great synergy (between Rodovid and Wikipedia) opportunity as there is a lot of genealogy information to be described for Wikipedia. As of I don't know (and never new) the team that is not in need of help. On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 10:09 AM, Samuel Klein&lt;meta.sj(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 4:45 PM, phoebe ayers&lt;phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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