[Foundation-l] WMF, and implications of non-discrimination on local projects?

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Joe Szilagyi <szilagyi at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is probably a tempest in a teapot, but it seemed like an interesting
> question. On a local "request for adminship" on English Wikipedia, an editor
> has stated he will not support anyone who is not Christian for Adminship,
> and the RFA in question is getting very intense. Would people opposing
> actions or volunteer positions based on religion, creed, race, or sexuality
> of a user run afoul of any local United States discrimination laws, or local
> San Francisco, California ones, where the WMF is housed?

It's a community thing. On en.wikibooks, our bureaucrats simply won't
pay attention to irrational and poorly supported votes. Bureaucrats
are able to use their judgement to consider the quality of votes above
the sheer quantity of them. As a nice side effect, since we
reformulated our policies to make this point explicit, we've not seen
any serious amounts of sockpuppeting or vote stuffing (because more
votes doesn't help). Of course, giving so much freedom of judgement to
a bureaucrat can be a little scary, and the community at en.wb has
been very selective about new bureaucrats (from what I understand, WP
is a little selective about it as well). I suggest to WP that there is
nothing wrong with only allowing "reasonable votes" from "reasonable
voters", with some members (bureaucrats?) trusted to differentiate
between the two.

Unfortunately, I dont think this really is a problem with
discrimination laws. Think about how the Boy Scouts have generally
disallowed homosexuals from participating in their programs. The Boy
Scouts don't get in serious trouble over these issues, although they
have lost access to some specific deals that they had with local
governments (lower taxes, lower rent, etc).

This isn't the first issue of RfA discrimination I've heard of over at
WP, age-related discrimination has been discussed all over the
blogosphere. What's unfortunate is that WP has been allowing such
votes to carry the same weight as votes which are made with proper
consideration paid to a user's edit history. The community has certain
standards when selecting new admins, and users who aren't voting with
those standards in mind arne't really participating in the process.

--Andrew Whitworth