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

[Nathan]

There are a couple of problems with doing it that way.

1) Global accounts go inactive in some cases because a user has begun using
a different account. It wouldn't be difficult, in that case, to acquire over
time multiple eligible accounts if there is no "recent edits" requirement.

2) As far as I know there is no centralised edit list or counter for unified
accounts. This could be remedied technologically, but I think we'd have to
establish a value for that ahead of time.

3) On the issue of inactivity negating standing... The problem is that
Wikimedia is a self-selecting community, and membership in the community is
based on continuing participation. If you go inactive you stop performing
the activity that made you part of the community to begin with. If someone
has been inactive for a year, two years, can we expect them to be in touch
with community values? Do we regard them, still, as "members" of the
community in which they have not recently participated? The "residence"
requirement in this sense is activity, and just like you need to be a
resident (or citizen) to vote in government elections you need to be
reasonably active in the Wikimedia community to retain suffrage.

I still think the best option is to register voters as people and not
accounts. Whether by membership or a simple voter roll of users identified
to the Foundation its the best way to limit abuse and ensure that voters are
active and "civic minded" members of the community.

Nathan

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 11:22 AM, Joe Szilagyi <szilagyi at gmail.com> wrote:

> Since there is SUL now wouldn't it be just easier to apply the edit count
> threshold to the unified account? If no one but active participants on the
> projects should be voting that would I'd imagine pretty much give anyone
> who
> may be active a bit here, and a bit there, access to vote. I'm sure someone
> can make a tool that will trivially do counts of someone's top x number of
> accounts, and apply the count threshold to the lifetime total of the SUL'd
> account. Drop the "must edit so many times" by such and such date
> requirement-- if someone has been inactive for some months, it doesn't
> negate their standing, right? The system would be much simpler then and
> global accounts would essentially get lifetime suffrage then.
>
> Joe
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