[Foundation-l] 2011 Board Elections: Input needed

[Aryeh Gregor]

2011/3/20 Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby at gmail.com>:
> * Developers who are not server administrators, but who have made a certain
> number of commits (what number is "sufficient"?)

Some things to keep in mind:

* Anyone can create an account to edit.  Getting commit access by
itself requires as much effort as a fairly large number of typical
edits.
* There are very few developers.  git shortlog -sn | wc -l says there
were 278 separate accounts who made commits anywhere in Wikimedia's
SVN repository, *ever*.  Some of those are duplicates, too, so the
actual figure is probably slightly lower.
* Almost all developers who would be interested in voting will have
made at least twenty edits to some project in the last six months.
I'd consider myself almost totally inactive as an editor -- I mostly
just fix the occasional error in articles I'm reading -- but I've made
more than that many edits to enwiki in the last six months.

So if you just allowed everyone with commit access to vote, you'd
probably wind up with like five extra people voting.  Given that most
developers do work that requires a lot more skill than most editing,
it seems fair to me (although maybe I'm biased :) ).  Alternatively,
if you allow only people who have made at least one commit in the last
six months, it's about 100 people total.

On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 8:56 AM, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would think there would be some developers contributing code to
> MediaWiki who are not also editors. Given the quasi-independence of
> MediaWiki development from everything else under the Wikimedia
> umbrella, would there still be enough connection to the Foundation's
> operations to render it desirable that they be enfranchised? (I would
> think so.)

I don't know why you think MediaWiki is quasi-independent from other
Wikimedia endeavors.  MediaWiki is a registered trademark of
Wikimedia, mediawiki.org is a Wikimedia site, the code is hosted by
Wikimedia, Wikimedia is the biggest and most important user, and
Wikimedia employees make the final determination on things like commit
access and code review.  It's certainly as much a Wikimedia project as
is, say, Wikiversity.