[Foundation-l] spamming of the english wikipedia users detected

[Andrew Gray]

On 03/07/07, oscar van dillen <oscarvandillen at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> it came to my attention because i was asked if this was sent by the
> wmf-board!? well: NO of course not!
>
> i wonder what IS going on behind this *spamming*: who? why? does
> anyone have a clue?

For the record, your informant wasn't looking very hard and/or chose
to omit some details in order to make it sound more alarming. Here
follows the exact message as I recieved it yesterday:

----

Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2007 07:08:44 GMT
To: Shimgray <shimgray at gmail.com>
Subject: You are invited to vote in the Wikimedia board elections!
From: Gmaxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>

Hi Shimgray, it appears that you have not yet voted in the current
Wikimedia board election, although you appear to be eligible to vote.

There are many reasons why it is very important that YOU vote in this
election. The board is responsible for oversight and direction of the
Wikimedia projects, including fundraising, defining the mission, and
determining foundation-wide policies, so though it does not have
direct input into English Wikipedia day-to-day policy, you still are
affected by what they choose to do.

The election process is simple, and because it uses approval voting,
you don't have to figure out who is best; you simply need to select
all candidates who are acceptable.

You can find out more about the election at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2007/en

The election closes at 23:59 on Saturday, July 7, 2007 (UTC, don't let
the timezone catch you off guard!). That means you still have time to
participate, although with thousands of words written in question and
answer pages it will probably take you a little time to build a fair
assessment of the candidates, so you should start looking now.

You can read the candidate statements at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2007/Candidate_presentation_guidelines/en
and each candidate has as Question/Answer page linked from their
statements.

Shimgray, it is critically important that you participate in this process.

As it stands right now substantially less than 16% of all eligible and
recently active voters on English Wikipedia have participated in the
election process. This is a lower turnout than previous years although
enwiki has always had poor voter turnout.

Low turnout makes the election process dramatically more vulnerable to
several types of bias; for example, people with strong emotions and
potentially unreasonable feelings about the candidates are more likely
to participate without encouragement. The impact of sockpuppets,
small-POV groups, and parties with any personal or financial interests
in the outcome is greater when turnout is low, because these parties
will tend to cast a fixed number of votes.

Regardless of the election outcome, low turnout from English Wikipedia
also sends the wrong message to the board. English Wikipedia is by far
the largest Wikimedia community, and English Wikipedia has, by far,
the largest readership. While it is very important that other
Wikimedia projects be well supported and understood by the board, the
importance of English Wikipedia should not be understated.

There are organized campaigns to increase turnout from some of the
other projects, and the result appears that English Wikipedia's
influence and interest in Wikimedia is far less than it actually is.

Even if you do not have an opinion on the outcome of the election,
even if you think that all candidates are acceptable or that all are
unacceptable, you can and should still vote.  We use approval voting,
and you can cast a vote approving everyone or even a vote approving no
one.  Neither of these two options will influence the direct outcome
of the election, but both will still add to the total count of English
Wikipedia voters and both will send the message that our project is
important and involved.

----

Note the "from" line says quite clearly who it's from, and this will
appear quite obviously to the user in any normal mail program...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk