Information in advance about mowiki happenings - Wikipedia-l

1 Oct 2005

Hi all,

Currently there is a sysop election on mowiki, where 3 candidates are
pitted against each other rather than being voted on separately: Me,
Dmitriid, and Jeorjika.

I have 131 contributions in the main namespace, Dmitriid has 10, and
Jeorjika has 0.

Now, there are a number of issues here which I wish to consult with
the wider community over.

First of all, who is allowed to vote.

As it stands now, everybody who has already "expressed an opinion"
about the Wikipedia may vote. The majority of people who have
"expressed an opinion" are ro.wikipedians, with a minority of
Moldovans and others (including people such as Oleg Alexandrov,
Landroni, Dmitriid, Jeorjika, Gabix who are Moldovans, OldakQuill,
Monedula, who are from elsewhere).

This has always seemed unfair to me, since most of these people have
less than 10 contributions total, and only a few of them have any
contributions in the main namespace.

When suggesting that only people with a certain number of
contributions prior to a certain date (say, 10) be allowed to vote, I
was labelled as antidemocratic. When an "outsider", Christopher
Sundita, attempted to vote, his vote was deleted on the grounds that
he had not previously "expressed his opinion".

To be perfectly clear, the main issues in this election are
unreasonable and have nothing really to do with sysops. Currently, it
has been painted by one user, Goie (whose total contributions to ALL
Wikipedias are small), as more of an election for president.

It seems that those who are against the existance of mo.wikipedia are
voting for Jeorjika, while those who understand that these elections
are for "janitors" rather than "presidents" seem to be planning to
vote for me (notably, Oleg Alexandrov and OldakQuill).

Currently, there are over 200 articles on the Moldovan Wikipedia.
Jeorjika said, in his campaign, that "under node", the Moldovan
Wikipedia hasn't progressed fast enough (!). Apparently, it is the
responsibility of the sysop to make sure that a Wikipedia grows at a
certain rate, or else... sort of like Speed 3: Wikipedia.

The main issue seems to me that the criteria of who can vote, and who
cannot, are difficult to determine. Of course, it's best to always let
the community handle such things, but in this case it's not clear who
is and isn't part of the community -- most of the people who are
eligible to vote have not made even a tiny peep on this Wikipedia for
months, while I, Gabix, and a few dedicated anons have written
articles.

Mark