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

[Dan Rosenthal]

Again why editcount-itis is bad. I have around 100 photos in my aperture
library that are marked 3 stars or higher. If I upload them all to my flickr
account and then use flickr tool to upload them to commons, then for each
photo make separate edits for categories, description, data, etc.... you
could have 600 edits in a couple of hours. You can take 3 or 4 pages, and
make 20 edits to them screwing around with small stuff, moving spaces
around, adding individual words or categories, instead of doing it all in
bulk.

In short, edit count suffrage requirements, in theory at least, exclude
legitimate voters, while not excluding people who want to game the system.

-Dan

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 1:41 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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-- 
Dan Rosenthal