[Foundation-l] Election mailings

[Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)]

Hello,

I completely agree with effeietsanders and have stated my opposition
in the larger thread. Bulk notification is great if the recipients
agree to it, such as with a mailing list or a separate option in their
preferences. That is not the case here, and I will also consider
disabling my wiki email if I continue to receive unsolicited
notification spam (I'll place my email address on my user page for
legitimate use, and block users who send notification spam to it).

There is also a problem with selection. Making a few hundred edits to
user pages and pet articles on one project does not mean they're
suddenly aware of issues faced by the Wikimedia Foundation, and can
rationally select trustees. For example, notifying *all* eligible
users includes those who are not even "fully aware of the fact that
users accounts are split between projects" (-- gmaxwell on [[m:user
talk:Pathoschild]]). In my opinion, the vote is for *community*
members, not anyone who edited pokémon articles 400 times; the
majority of users on en-Wikipedia who received the bulk 'vote!' spam
are probably not community members. Non-community users are normally
filtered out by announcements being made on community pages like
announcement pages, discussion pages, mailing lists, aggregated blogs,
et cetera.

If you think bulk notification is important, you might consider
sending out one last notification explaining the announcement list,
and send all new bulk notifications to that mailing list. New users
can be linked to it from the MediaWiki message they see when they
register, or {{welcome}} templates.

Yours cordially,
Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)