[Foundation-l] for the future...

[GerardM]

Hoi,
When you compare this election with the previous one, this election is going
relatively smoothly. The sad thing is the issue with the number of required
edits. This has been rectified. In the WMF there is a "so fix it" culture,
when Gregory found that people did not vote, he send an e-mail that was
neutral in that it did not promote any particular candidate. He has been
willing to assist in sending similar e-mails to people of other projects.
Jimmy suggested that we could remind people to vote in a next election. This
is a fine suggestion

Personally, I think of an election process as something that is fixed, there
is room for a given set of behaviours and I was surprised by it all. It
certainly has shaken my understanding what an election is within the
Wikimedia Foundation. I do disagree that the result of Gregory's mailing is
necessarily negative and I certainly would not compare it with the previous
election.

I do hope that the people criticising the process this time around will
become part of the solution for the next elections.

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 7/6/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> On 7/5/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 7/5/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> > > On 7/4/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > I have no idea what the election outcome will be... which is far
> less
> > > > than I knew when turnout was really miserable. I don't know how
> these
> > > > people will vote, since as far as I can tell this is the first time
> a
> > > > lot of them have ever been asked about how we run things (most of
> the
> > > > eligible don't participate much in the normal community drama)...
> > > >
> > > Can you clarify what you mean by this?
> >
> > Well, I expect my meaning was clear enough to the intended recipient
> > of the email, but since I screwed up and sent it to the list I guess I
> > can elaborate.
> >
> Well, the obvious implication is that you were worried about a certain
> result, and you took steps to try to prevent that result.  I'm not
> sure exactly who it was you were trying to sabotage, but I think this
> revelation moves your actions from innocent good-faith spamming to a
> bad faith attempt to manipulate the election.
>
> So nice to know we get to experience that two elections in a row now.
>
> > Before I emailed people no effort had been made to make sure that
> > people were aware of the election beyond hardcore 'meta-pedians',
> > people with a heavy involvement in our internal sausage factory and
> > all the infighting and drama that goes with it.   I can justify this
> > belief three ways:
> >
> > (1) We didn't effectively have a sitenotice for the election on our
> > largest project before my mailings started. Yes, there was a site
> > notice, but anyone who had hidden it since December wouldn't have seen
> > it. There was no message sent to wikien-l announcing the start of the
> > voting period. I can't find an announcement on the enwp village pump;
> > if someone can find one, please point me to it.
> >
> > (2) Even with the sitenotice, only people logged in during the 10-day
> > span of the election would have found out about it, because there has
> > been no anon notice (except for a short time). I very nearly missed it
> > myself.
> >
> > Interestingly, the four projects with the highest early turnout had it
> > in their anon notice:
> >
> http://tools.wikimedia.de/~gmaxwell/election_analysis/ivote3/GRAPH_1_turnout.png
> > Nowikipedia took it out of the anon notice a bit after the election
> > started. Fi too had it in anon notice and they show the same abrupt
> > increase. Something worth further investigation.
> >
> > A while back I measured the number of active Wikipedians in 1-day,
> > 1-week, 2-week, 1-month, and 2-month windows. .. and I found there
> > were a lot more people than I expected in the longer windows,
> > indicating that we have a lot of people with editing patterns long
> > gaps on the scale of one to several weeks.   I think it doesn't take
> > much of a leap of reasoning to think that a 'short' sitenotice is
> > going to get you a biased selection including far too many of the
> > 'hardcore' Wikipedians.
> >
> > (3) After considering these biases I decided I would measure enwiki's
> > turnout, voters/eligible and recently active users. I did not, at that
> > time, have a dump of the database loaded. Checking the contribs of 6.8
> > million users is not practical over http, even using a bot... so I
> > started by listing people who have edited community pages... I grabbed
> > the list of most recent 5000 contribs to every community page I could
> > think of, WP:AN, WP:VP, ref desk, FAC, *FD, the people in WP:1000, and
> > a half-dozen other pages. I checked them for eligibility, and found
> > enough people to shock me about how low the turnout was. I started
> > drafting my email. I needed a fairer list, however, if I was going to
> > email everyone, and I was able to generate one that was
> > all-inclusive... it was an interesting result that the list of all
> > recently active people was 4x larger than the one I generated from
> > just community pages!
> >
> > So.. here are all these people... 3/4 of the active editor base. They
> > aren't currently participating heavily in policy discussion.. they
> > aren't busily giving awards to each other. I'd be willing to wager
> > most aren't on the mailing lists.  What are they doing? ... They are
> > writing the freaking encyclopedia!
> >
> > Since I don't see much evidence of these people being really active
> > participants in the usual policy stuff, I'm guessing that we really
> > haven't asked them how they think things ought to be run.
> >
> > Now... some might argue that those folks shouldn't participate in the
> > elections because they aren't aware enough of the issues. Well, that's
> > our own fault. We're claiming to have an open democratic election...
> > and so long as we're going to do that, we shouldn't fake it.
> >
> > Someone could convince me that a non-democratic process can get better
> > results, but no one is going to convince me that a broken,
> > systematically biased, pseudo-democratic system is actually better.
> >
> > So given all that, I have no idea what will happen. I don't know how
> > these people will respond to the election. I don't know if the results
> > will be good or bad (and quite frankly, it will be a year before I
> > could answer if I thought the result was good or bad in any case).
> >
> > So perhaps it would be more useful to say what I thought would happen
> > before: (and don't freaking partially quote me on this)
> > I expected results like last year's, which is to say:
> > *I expected people who were not well known in 'meta-pedian' circles to
> > do poorly, independent of the merits of their platforms or their
> > personal qualities.
> > *I expected to see strong evidence of strategic voting: the leader
> > substantially ahead of 2nd, rather than a more flat-top distribution
> > which I would expect from an approval vote.
> >
> > Those all still might happen; after all, I didn't change the number of
> > voters by that much... but I feel less confident.
> >
> > I didn't expect this before I sent the mail... I knew that the bulk of
> > the people were not involved on enwiki wikipediaspace cruft... But as
> > the replies rolled in, a lot of them were questions about how to vote.
> > People were totally confused by the metapedian jargon, a level of
> > jargon deeper than the typical Wikpedian jargon.
> >
> > People read:
> > "You meet the voter requirements, you can continue directly to the
> > voting page. You must vote from that project; please select the
> > correct wiki below (you must be logged in there)."
> >
> > And gave up and asked me what to do next. .. And these people aren't
> > idiots. If the email sigs, domain names, and auto-responders are to be
> > believed, we have a lot more doctors, lawyers, and other professionals
> > who edit than I had previously thought.
> >
> > So in any case, as I said..
> > I do know that it has been a wild ride.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
>
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