[Foundation-l] Election mailings

[Andrew Gray]

On 05/07/07, Jesse Martin (Pathoschild) <pathoschild at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, I snipped it because I think it is a tendentious and meaningless
definition. This election is for the Wikimedia community - and you can
damn well be a member of that community without being on a mailing
list or reading the constant flow of nonsense on "community"
discussion pages. I quite happily go months on end without looking at
the enwiki Village Pump or admin's noticeboard.

The community is huge. It's quite possible to have involved
interaction with many other editors, be fully part of the community,
and never stir outside of a small wikiproject or never look at
anything more meta than an article discussion page.

It's simply silly to state that you're not considering these people
community members. They come here; they work with the project; they
involve themselves in it. Because they don't partake in endless
timewasting meta-debates, they should not have any say in one of the
most fundamental decisions on how our projects are governed?

> 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."

But then, bulk-inviting every eligible user also gives us an
opportunity to say - you have this power to vote, and here's why it's
important. This is the problem with relying on passive methods like
sitenotice - you can alert the people who already know about it that
way, but you can't easily reach out to those who don't follow what's
going on.

We could do this with an announcements-l, but attempts to do this in
the past have failed. People just aren't very good at signing up to
Yet Another Additional Service, especially one that might only mean
anything six months from then.

I reiterate, incidentally, that if the Foundation chose to take these
emails under  its wing, they'd be more than legitimate even by a
strict construction of the email policy, without setting up new opt-in
lists, etc. Indeed, what might seem a good idea is to set up an
additional tickbox for opting in or out of Major Notifications
(foundation elections, perhaps local project arbcom elections, perhaps
major fund drive notificiations or downtime warnings - but nothing
less important), default it to being enabled, and send out a "Hi, we
have this new notification system, in accordance with what you said
when you registered your email - here's how to opt out" mail...

(For anything else I would say, sure, keep to a strict opt-in method.
But I think we need to weigh the fact that our poor track-record of
communication means that not taking some slightly bold steps means
we're basically disenfranchising good chunks of the community, and the
visible evidence that this method *does* sharply increase turnout.)

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

True. 400-edits is an arbitrary cutoff, but it's not a bad one. To
have hit "save" four hundred times and kept coming back for three
months may seem trivial to those of us who hack away for hours, but
it's a pretty meaningful level of commitment when you're at that
stage. It's certainly a bit past the point at which - in my experience
- people seem to start being proud of their edit count, of the amount
of work they've done "for the project" - in other words, when they
start thinking of *themselves* as part of the community.

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