[Foundation-l] How was the "only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote" rule decided?

[Ryan Lomonaco]

I have no opinion on whether the rule should exist, but it is something that
deserves to be looked at.  There are valid reasons for requiring a minimum
recent edit count, of course, but perhaps there are better ways to handle
it.

The rules did disenfranchise me, for example.  It doesn't bother me that I
can't vote, but that said, I would've liked to vote if eligible.  I am not
active on Wikipedia, but I do follow the mailing lists, and have followed
the election process.  If I really wanted to, I could've racked up 50 edits
to get a vote, but that almost seems "dirty", I guess, to make edits just to
regain eligibility for the election.

My thought is that there may be other ways to enfranchise users who are
clearly community members, but who for some reason or another are inactive
on the projects themselves.  What those ways are, I don't know.

One thought:  If the only, or at least the major reason that we're doing
this is to avoid fraud, users with "committed identities" - encrypted
messages on their user page as a way to verify their identity in case an
account is stolen - could be re-enfranchised on a case-by-case basis if they
can provide the passphrase.

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:08 PM, Brian<Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> > The second sentence should read: There is no information in the current
> > heuristic that indicates that editors who are allowed to vote are more or
> > less familiar with the candidates than those who are not.
>
> Who says there needs to be?
>
> The recent edits criteria reduces the incentive to crack or otherwise
> collect old unused but qualified accounts. For example, I could setup
> a free watchlist aggregation service and users would give me their
> passwords. Over time I could obtain many and then wait for accounts to
> naturally become inactive, then I could vote with them.
>
> It also makes it harder to otherwise obtain votes from accounts whos
> owners have lost interest in the project and might be willing to part
> with theirs easily.  Recent editing activity also provides more
> information for analysis in the event that some kind of vote fraud is
> suspected.
>
> A recent edits criteria is justifiable on this kind of process basis alone.
>
> 50 edits can easily be made in a couple of hours, even if you're not
> making trivial changes.  If you're not putting that level of effort it
> seems somewhat doubtful that you're going to read the >0.5 MBytes of
> text or so needed to completely and carefully review the provided
> candidate material from scratch.  Like all stereotypes it won't hold
> true for everyone but if it's true on average then it will produce an
> average improvement, we just need to be careful not to disenfranchise
> too many.
>
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[[User:Ral315]]