[Foundation-l] for the future...

[Robert Horning]

Dan Rosenthal wrote:
> I think most people on english wikipedia who are eligible voters are  
> not likely to be mailing list subscribers.
>
> -Dan Rosenthal
>   

With many foundation mailing lists having hundreds (thousands for 
Wikipedia-en-l?) of postings, no wonder they don't want to sign up for 
them.  S/N level can be quite low in many cases, especially if you 
aren't interested in policy matters.

This sounds to me like trying to fix the symptom rather than the 
cause.... that many Wikipedians who may be eligible to vote don't like 
the current communications systems and are uninterested in being 
involved with community forums.  One particular system that is intended 
primarily for other uses is instead being proposed here to be used for 
mass communication, without the consent of those who are having this 
method of communication.

E-mail spam has a notoriously low acceptance rate (I've seen figures as 
low as of 1 in 1,000,000 as examples for response rates), but it is 
still done because of the incredible low cost.

Andrew Gray wrote:
> On 04/07/07, Robert Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> I'm curious by what statistical methodology you determined this
>> quantifiable figure of "a sufficiently small minority"?  Those who voice
>> their opinions here on this list can't be counted upon to represent the
>> much, much larger Wikimedia community, and that fact seems to get
>> forgotten quite frequently on this list, except perhaps on a
>> philosophical camp basis.
>>     
>
> Well, Greg did say that he had only a small handful of objections or
> complaints in response to the email, which seems a good indication
> that most actual recipients weren't outraged...
>
>   
That is a small handful of objections by those who bothered to not 
simply hit the delete button when they saw the message.  And the small 
handful of those who also were glad to have received the message, no doubt.

Mind you with all this, I'm not really complaining about this particular 
message that was sent out, because I did not receive the spam in spite 
of the fact that I am eligible to vote using my en.wikipedia account and 
did not vote that way.  Perhaps the filters mentioned earlier caught my 
name and culled it out as I did vote using another project.

What I'm objecting to here is the idea that this could be tried again, 
and I would like to put forward the idea that I'm not alone with the 
idea that I don't want to have my e-mail address on project accounts 
used for mass mailings.  That technical means could also be used to help 
disable this, I would hope that any such feature added to the user 
preferences page is automatically set in the "disabled" position to 
force this to be explicitly an "opt-in" function for users that may want 
this sort of communication.  I also fail to see why developer time to 
implement this feature and add extra bugs to MediaWiki is required when 
a very simply solution, a low-volume mailing list of Foundation 
announcements, is currently available as a significant alternative which 
is being discounted immediately after it is proposed.  Nor is this even 
the only solution.

-- Robert Horning