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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/3/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> What I find most disturbing in this is that someone, other than the
> people who are independently running the election, should have access to
> records of who has and who hasn't voted, and then be able to use that
> for his spam list.  Saying that only 15% have voted is one thing, but
> identifying who is in that 15% is quite another.

Thank you for putting to rest the question of how experienced our much
our most tenured editors are about the election process. ...

While I'd like to accept the compliments about my HAxX0r skills, I can't...

The list of voters is public. It always has been public.

https://wikimedia.spi-inc.org/index.php/Special:Boardvote/list

It is very good that it is public because the community helps the
election com detect sock activity.


> The argument that some of these people might not be aware that an
> election in progress is spurious justification for these actions.  To
> whatever extent WMF may have democratic structures, the persons who have
> such rights must accept some responsibility for keeping themselves
> informed of major democratic processes.  If they don't they get the
> results that they deserve.
[snip]

As I outlined in my message.. it goes beyond that.  When only a tiny
fraction of our users vote it becomes very easy for small POV groups
or sockmasters to take control over the election. The cost of doing
so, and the chances of being caught increase dramatically as the
number of voters goes up. (this is because POV groups tend to be small
fixed sizes, and because sockmasters need to collect larger and larger
pools of IPs to operate socks from... getting a few hundreds IPs isn't
hard.. getting a few thousand is much harder)

As such, so long as we are holding public elections it is in all of
our interests to ensure that there is wide participation.