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

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 4:45 PM, phoebe ayers<phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear everyone,
> As a reminder, we also discussed suffrage requirements on this list last year:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-April/042105.html
>
> As a response to concerns over the proposed requirement that there be
> 50 edits between April and June before the election, this period was
> lengthened to January to June, and now here we are.

It might help to have a list of tricky subjects worthy of steady
discussion and improvement.   We don't have much of a general
philosophy of suffrage (we already have a number of somewhat arbitrary
exceptions, and certainly early wiki contributors would have hated the
idea of edit count being used as any measure of dedication), and it's
important enough to be worth more than the occasional email thread.


I don't take issue with that element of the requirements, but I do
think we are excluding smaller projects, where each contribution takes
more time and it is rare to have any qualified voters who aren't
running bots.  (why should bot-runners get special recognition?  Is it
truly such a valuable task to add batches of stubs?)

A future request : It would be handy if the election tool redirected
ineligible voters to a place where they can share their priorities and
thoughts, at least to the tune of a short paragraph.  'Ineligible to
vote' makes people sad, and should not mean 'unqualified to contribute
to the future of the projects'.

SJ