[Foundation-l] Voting suffrage criteria (established members should be able to vote)

[John Vandenberg]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net> wrote:
> I don't agree with the solution proposed, but the situation illustrates
> more generally some of the problems with our election system. Let me
> provide another illustration.
>
> We had a meetup this past week attended by a number of people involved
> in Wikimedia projects. The group included several researchers who have
> worked on Wikipedia, studied its social dynamics, especially how
> policies are used and applied, and presented papers to academic
> conferences on these issues. These are people with a good understanding
> of the community and I think they would be well-suited to participate
> intelligently in the process of choosing board members. Nevertheless,
> some of these same people do not actually have enough edits to vote in
> the election, even though they've studied the community more closely
> than most of those who did vote.
>
> Over time, the elections are also showing the same edit-count creep that
> manifests itself in the selection of administrators on mature projects.
> The effect is to increasingly exclude people who should have been
> considered part of the community. I don't have easy solutions for how to
> address this while still preventing manipulation through sockpuppet
> accounts and the like, but this is one reason we added a second method
> for the community to choose board members through the chapter selection
> process. In the chapter setting, participation is more clearly related
> to individual identity, and it goes some distance toward offering the
> membership system that was originally contemplated, whose failure to
> implement some people still lament.

Knowing about the community is not the same as having contributed free
content to the world.

600 edits is simple.  It equates to about 10 hours worth of copy and
pasting on English Wikisource; a task any novice could do.  The same
can be achieved in a few hours with AWB on Wikipedia (although the
tasks to perform are a bit harder to find these day on English
Wikipedia), or a few days on New page patrol.  On Commons,
[[Category:Media needing categories as of 18 November 2007]] has 425
images, which could be mostly cleared with a few hours using the
HotCat Gadget.

--
John