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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/3/07, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wide as in broad and representative of the variety of projects,
> yes. Wide as in numerous at any one specific project or
> language, please no.

Some people think that our projects and languages have needs which are
at odds with on and another.  I generally regard people who hold such
as factionalists.

As far as I can tell, our needs are not that different, we share a
common interest, and we succeed or fail as one.

As such, it is all our interest to have many real users participate...
for the purposes of outnumbering socks and people trying to manipulate
the results it doesn't matter which project the voters come from, so
long as they are real Wikimedians who share our values and our fate.

I also think, however, that something is wrong when our supposedly
democratic election suffers from over or under representation of some
subprojects.  Thats the situation today... with Enwiki showing a much
lower turn out than some other major projects (like dewiki).

It is also important to make sure the minorities interests are
protected against the tyranny of the majority. There are many ways to
achieve this, for example if the majority is wise and compassionate
there is no tyranny... if that can't be achieved deliberate actions
can be taken to ensure representation, for example, seats on the board
could be set aside for sub-interests. ... Such decisions can be made
and should only be made intentionally and carefully.

We should not pretend that the accidental (through random causes or
systemic bias) low turnout from some community is a replacement for an
intentional measure to make sure that all views are represented.