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

[Kwan Ting Chan]

Brian wrote:
> 
> Speaking of consensus, where can I find the consensus for severely
> restricting the number of people who can vote by an arbitrary rule, and
> where is the consensus for the particular rule? You make it clear that The
> Powers That Be sit around a coffee table and pick whatever they think is
> best. In the absence of such a consensus the default would be a more
> permissive voting system.

Actually, the general case with Wikimedia, at least from my experience, 
is that consensus are required to make a major change, not to maintain 
the status quo. Having an edit requirement of some form *is* the status 
quo, as I pointed out in my earlier email.

Anyway, that's not how things work with the board election for WMF 
anyway. At the end of the day, despite what we might want, WMF is not a 
membership organization. And who get to be on the board is determined by 
its bylaws. The bylaws, which may be updated any time by the board 
states "The Board of Trustees shall determine the dates, rules and 
regulation of the voting procedures, which, beginning in 2009, shall 
take place in odd-numbered years. The Board shall determine who is 
qualified to vote for community-selected Trustees.".

In practice, the board delegating this responsibility to a number of 
community members who forms the election community, while of course 
maintaining final approval / veto power over the committee's decisions.

And from experience, I can tell you the reality of establishing the 
rules work by starting from last year, and updating or modifying based 
on feedbacks. And that mean, given no strong community consensus to 
change our present form of requiring some form of edit requirement, 
having that requirement.

KTC

-- 
Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
     - Heinrich Heine
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/attachments/20090731/ed081acc/attachment.pgp