[Foundation-l] Election mailings

[Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)]

Hello,

Note my definition of a "community member" that you snipped out of the
quote: anyone who has any participation in or reads community pages.
This only excludes users whose *only* participation is editing
articles, and does not result in an echo chamber. As I said, previous
announcement methods tended to exclude non-community users.

Inviting users to join an announcements mailing list, as I've
suggested, simultaneously notifies them of elections *and* makes them
more aware of some of the issues at hand. The Wikimedia Foundation
faces serious real-world issues, and the users best placed to vote on
who will represent them in addressing these issues are those who know
the Foundation exists behind [[w:pokémon]] on en-Wikipedia.
Bulk-inviting every technically eligible user to vote is like saying,
"Dear Canadian citizen, you've set foot in France within the past ten
years. Please vote for the new president."

All that said, keep in mind that we're discussing which method to use
to notify users, not trading personal opinions of wiki suffrage. :)

Yours cordially,
Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)


On 7/5/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am worried about the implications of "we shouldn't tell the
> electorate about the election in case they're not the right sort of
> people" - if this is not a sufficient threshold for voting, your
> problem should be with the people who *chose that as the threshold*,
> not with the people who tried to get the eligible voters to vote.
> Ought we to be second-guessing what makes people good electors?
>