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

[Andrew Gray]

On 04/07/07, Tuvic <tuvic.tuvic at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's totally incorrect. The checkbox says "Enable e-mail from other
> users", not "Enable bot-generated targetted mailings". It's an abuse
> of the e-mail-function according to me: this is not what it's meant
> for. I can see this slipping into signpost updates, Rfd-notices, and a
> whole lot of other purposes, and it will probably end in users
> disabling the e-mail function.

"The email address may be used by the Wikimedia Foundation to
communicate with users on a wider scale", quoth our good friend the
privacy policy. I'm not sure what Special:Preferences has to say about
it, but that sentence does seem to cover a multitude of sins.

If people start mass-mailing out notifications for weekly newsletters
or deletion campaigns or what have you, please tell me and I will
personally beat them around the head for aggravated stupidity.

This is fundamentally not the same thing as a routine announcement
like that - it is targetted at a specific subset of the community
(those community members in good standing eligible to vote who have
not done so; though personally I'd prefer "and have been active in the
past two months"); it is an exceptional occurence, and a once-off.

Most significantly, it is intended to address something *specifically
about the users selected* - namely that they have a right as community
members which they have not exercised, whether through not knowing
about it or any other reason. This is very different from any kind of
"notification" mailing...

Slippery-slope arguments have their place, but to pretend that we
aren't capable of making a common-sense distinction between "important
messages affecting the whole community" and "routine junk" is just
silly. This is a rare event, and it is deeply unlikely we will start
doing this on a regular basis for anything which isn't unusual.

Yes, some people found it irritating; but those people seem to have
correlated reasonably well with those who already knew about the
elections and/or had seen the copy Greg sent to wikien-l (? somewhere,
anyway) shortly beforehand. The evidence seems to suggest that
substantially more appreciated it and felt they benefitted from
recieving it, and that it boosted the involvement of the "editing
community" with the "governing community". These really do not seem to
be outweighed by worries about what *might* possibly happen *if*
people start being stupid.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk