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

[Brian]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Philippe Beaudette <
pbeaudette at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Allow me, please, to reinforce this, wearing my "election committee
> member" hat.
>
> This years' rules were mostly carryovers from last years' rules.  When
> we started, we looked around, realized that no significant opposition
> to last years' rules had been expressed, checked the talk pages to be
> sure, and modified the rules to cover anything we thought needed to be
> changed (for instance, this year we were able to use edits from across
> wikis, using SUL - which was one of the points of opposition that was
> raised last year, but there was not a technically feasible method to
> do it at the time).
>
> I'm sure that if there is significant response to the edit count
> requirement, next year's committee will happily (he said confidently,
> with no intent to volunteer for next year's committee) review it then.
>
> Philippe
>

It should be the goal of all those who hold power to convince the populace
that they must arrive at a consensus in order to change the status quo. That
way those with power can more easily enact laws that appear uncontroversial
and have them enter the status quo. Their power is then enhanced by the
inherent difficulty in achieving a consensus, especially when the tools
available for reaching consensus on general issues are brittle and difficult
to use. It is further enhanced by quoting the status quo standard often,
discouraging any attempts to enact change by pointing out that it would be
extremely difficult to get everyone to agree since you are a mere
individual.

An alternate system would, by default, put power back in the hands of the
community frequently, taking advantage of the fact that technology makes it
trivial to sample their voices as often as seems fair. I suppose you will
tell me that I can do this - I just have to vote for a candidate for the
board that agrees with my views. This is a great idea, except that I am not
eligible to vote.

The WMF is a far cry from the original vision of it as a membership
organization. Also, the board propagates stale laws under the notion of
status quo for which the original "consensus" is no longer remembered. There
is further no top down effort to ask the community if they have any good
ideas, and then ask the community what they think about the best of those
ideas. That, in my view, is a broken system.