[Foundation-l] for the future...

[Anthony]

On 7/5/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
Well, the obvious implication is that you were worried about a certain
result, and you took steps to try to prevent that result.  I'm not
sure exactly who it was you were trying to sabotage, but I think this
revelation moves your actions from innocent good-faith spamming to a
bad faith attempt to manipulate the election.

So nice to know we get to experience that two elections in a row now.

> 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.
>
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