[Foundation-l] spamming of the english wikipedia users detected

[Anthony]

On 7/3/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> As I outlined in my message.. it goes beyond that.  When only a tiny
> fraction of our users vote it becomes very easy for small POV groups
> or sockmasters to take control over the election. The cost of doing
> so, and the chances of being caught increase dramatically as the
> number of voters goes up. (this is because POV groups tend to be small
> fixed sizes, and because sockmasters need to collect larger and larger
> pools of IPs to operate socks from... getting a few hundreds IPs isn't
> hard.. getting a few thousand is much harder)
>
Getting a few hundred non-blocked IPs and creating a few hundred
highly active user accounts, then voting with those accounts in a way
which affects the election, all without getting caught, would be
extremely difficult.  Pretty much impossible if by "affects the
election" you mean electing someone to the board who is totally
unsupported by the community, and completely impossible if you expect
that this sockpuppet-elected candidate is going to be able to use that
board power to do things which are unsupported by the rest of the
board.

> As such, so long as we are holding public elections it is in all of
> our interests to ensure that there is wide participation.
>
Absolutely not true.  It may be in *your* interest to ensure that
there is wide participation, but to someone who supports the same
candidates as those core members who keep themselves up-to-date on
elections, it's in their best interest to ensure that participation is
limited to that core group of members.  And if a group really is its
own worst enemy, then it's even in the best interest of the survival
of the group that participation is narrow.