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

[John Vandenberg]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 3:46 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 1:41 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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.

> Again why editcount-itis is bad.

The suffrage requirement was 600 edits, and 50 in three months.  That
is not a reasonable example of editcount-itis.

> 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.

Most users start off doing these tasks the laborious way.
That you can uploading 100 images with a few strokes of your wand
doesn't mean you should obtain suffrage after only 10 minutes effort.

The 600 edits is a simple requirement to ensure that a person is still
active in a project.  It keeps the voting community grounded in doing
something useful.

> 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.

Maybe, however on many wikis that would swiftly result in guidance,
followed by stern warnings, blocks and/or questions in peoples minds.

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

As I explained, anyone can meet the suffrage requirements by simply
accepting them as they are, and putting in a few hours on a single
wiki.  Legitimate voters are those who actually do some real content
creation.  Even our sysadmins could easily attain this edit
requirement without issue by contributing to our computer software and
operating system wikibooks. (I mention them as they were a class of
extraordinary people mentioned in foundation-l suffrage discussions
before this years election period)

Rather than devoting resources to increase flexibility of who should
have suffrage, I would rather the time is spent on excluding the
likelihood of the system being gamed.  Any gaming going on with a 600
edit requirement is likely affecting a real wiki somewhere.  If
someone is voting twice in board elections, they will likely be voting
twice in other issues.

--
John Vandenberg