[Foundation-l] for the future...

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/5/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> On 7/4/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have no idea what the election outcome will be... which is far less
> > than I knew when turnout was really miserable. I don't know how these
> > people will vote, since as far as I can tell this is the first time a
> > lot of them have ever been asked about how we run things (most of the
> > eligible don't participate much in the normal community drama)...
> >
> Can you clarify what you mean by this?

Well, I expect my meaning was clear enough to the intended recipient
of the email, but since I screwed up and sent it to the list I guess I
can elaborate.

Before I emailed people no effort had been made to make sure that
people were aware of the election beyond hardcore 'meta-pedians',
people with a heavy involvement in our internal sausage factory and
all the infighting and drama that goes with it.   I can justify this
belief three ways:

(1) We didn't effectively have a sitenotice for the election on our
largest project before my mailings started. Yes, there was a site
notice, but anyone who had hidden it since December wouldn't have seen
it. There was no message sent to wikien-l announcing the start of the
voting period. I can't find an announcement on the enwp village pump;
if someone can find one, please point me to it.

(2) Even with the sitenotice, only people logged in during the 10-day
span of the election would have found out about it, because there has
been no anon notice (except for a short time). I very nearly missed it
myself.

Interestingly, the four projects with the highest early turnout had it
in their anon notice:
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~gmaxwell/election_analysis/ivote3/GRAPH_1_turnout.png
Nowikipedia took it out of the anon notice a bit after the election
started. Fi too had it in anon notice and they show the same abrupt
increase. Something worth further investigation.

A while back I measured the number of active Wikipedians in 1-day,
1-week, 2-week, 1-month, and 2-month windows. .. and I found there
were a lot more people than I expected in the longer windows,
indicating that we have a lot of people with editing patterns long
gaps on the scale of one to several weeks.   I think it doesn't take
much of a leap of reasoning to think that a 'short' sitenotice is
going to get you a biased selection including far too many of the
'hardcore' Wikipedians.

(3) After considering these biases I decided I would measure enwiki's
turnout, voters/eligible and recently active users. I did not, at that
time, have a dump of the database loaded. Checking the contribs of 6.8
million users is not practical over http, even using a bot... so I
started by listing people who have edited community pages... I grabbed
the list of most recent 5000 contribs to every community page I could
think of, WP:AN, WP:VP, ref desk, FAC, *FD, the people in WP:1000, and
a half-dozen other pages. I checked them for eligibility, and found
enough people to shock me about how low the turnout was. I started
drafting my email. I needed a fairer list, however, if I was going to
email everyone, and I was able to generate one that was
all-inclusive... it was an interesting result that the list of all
recently active people was 4x larger than the one I generated from
just community pages!

So.. here are all these people... 3/4 of the active editor base. They
aren't currently participating heavily in policy discussion.. they
aren't busily giving awards to each other. I'd be willing to wager
most aren't on the mailing lists.  What are they doing? ... They are
writing the freaking encyclopedia!

Since I don't see much evidence of these people being really active
participants in the usual policy stuff, I'm guessing that we really
haven't asked them how they think things ought to be run.

Now... some might argue that those folks shouldn't participate in the
elections because they aren't aware enough of the issues. Well, that's
our own fault. We're claiming to have an open democratic election...
and so long as we're going to do that, we shouldn't fake it.

Someone could convince me that a non-democratic process can get better
results, but no one is going to convince me that a broken,
systematically biased, pseudo-democratic system is actually better.

So given all that, I have no idea what will happen. I don't know how
these people will respond to the election. I don't know if the results
will be good or bad (and quite frankly, it will be a year before I
could answer if I thought the result was good or bad in any case).

So perhaps it would be more useful to say what I thought would happen
before: (and don't freaking partially quote me on this)
I expected results like last year's, which is to say:
*I expected people who were not well known in 'meta-pedian' circles to
do poorly, independent of the merits of their platforms or their
personal qualities.
*I expected to see strong evidence of strategic voting: the leader
substantially ahead of 2nd, rather than a more flat-top distribution
which I would expect from an approval vote.

Those all still might happen; after all, I didn't change the number of
voters by that much... but I feel less confident.

I didn't expect this before I sent the mail... I knew that the bulk of
the people were not involved on enwiki wikipediaspace cruft... But as
the replies rolled in, a lot of them were questions about how to vote.
People were totally confused by the metapedian jargon, a level of
jargon deeper than the typical Wikpedian jargon.

People read:
"You meet the voter requirements, you can continue directly to the
voting page. You must vote from that project; please select the
correct wiki below (you must be logged in there)."

And gave up and asked me what to do next. .. And these people aren't
idiots. If the email sigs, domain names, and auto-responders are to be
believed, we have a lot more doctors, lawyers, and other professionals
who edit than I had previously thought.

So in any case, as I said..
I do know that it has been a wild ride.