[Wikipedia-l] Re: logo - I will be bold

[Erik Moeller]

Anthere-
> You started the new logo contest. You made the pages,
> you set the rules. Some people are following all the
> cheating that is occurring along, and you have no
> reaction whatsoever.

I have responded several times on [[Talk:International logo vote]]  
concerning specifically the matter of anonymous voting. My current  
suggestion is: Let's keep an eye on what's going on, and let's set a clear  
policy for the final vote that only people with existing user pages on  
Meta can vote (I'm not sure if we want to make it necessary to be logged  
in, because that's harder to control). With the amount of voting going on  
right now, it is neither practical nor useful to follow up on every edit,  
and the overall picture has not changed significantly since the vote has  
started.

The image swapping is of course annoying, but let's not assume  
maliciousness without good reason. Our software overwrites images without  
prompting, and in spite of my explicit warning not to use obvious  
filenames, several contestants have done so. The recent swapping seems to  
have been an act of deliberate vandalism, and it was reverted before I  
could react; the vote was adjusted accordingly. I myself have reverted two  
image uploads. What more do you want?

> anyone can vote
> without anyone knowing them

Well, what do you propose as an alternative? People vote from all  
Wikipedias, including the very small ones, so it's very hard to track down  
individuals. I think the solution to require at least a redirect to an  
existing user page is a good one.

> anyone can replace the
> logo of someone else by his,

And anyone can replace the text of the logo pages and the votes  
themselves, imagine that! ;-) That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the  
whole image uploading/deleting/reverting process is currently ugly as hell  
and in desperate need of recoding. I shall await your PHP patches.

> And perhaps a logo which was in the top 10 before
> being replaced by another won't be in the top 10
> anymore, just because someone had fun replacing that
> top 10 logo.

The regularly updated top 20 page which someone started is of no relevance  
whatsoever. I will do the real final count later today (today is the  
voting deadline for the first round) and may throw out some votes as  
irrelevant.

> The logo issue in itself is not important. But again,
> this case is an experiment. It is the experiment of
> how of whole organization could work together with a
> common decision process. With respect and honesty
> toward those who created the artwork, and respect and
> honesty toward those who came to vote, and have the
> belief we are all sharing something.

Sure. I think it's working fine. We have over 130 logos, many of them  
excellent, and a very very interested and active Wikipedia community that  
is currently expressing its opinion on their quality. It works exactly as  
expected and the level of vandalism or cheating I have noticed is very  
low.

> User:Kat left a couple of days ago,

People leave all the time and whenever they do, they become the fodder for  
other people's arguments. Frankly, I'm getting tired of this. Please don't  
speak for others.

> Right now, at wikipedia-wide
> level, community does not scale either.

Yeah, we've only managed to create 150,000 articles on en:. We'll never  
grow past 300,000 ;-)

> I think any of
> the international votes are important because they are
> big scale experiment of how a "big" community could
> take decisions together.

Using wiki for voting is a bit like using a trout as a hammer; it's very  
messy and you end up smelling like fish. Well, not exactly, but it is  
certainly not the best way to organize a large vote. But until we have  
voting support in our software, it's the best we can do and necessarily  
limited. These limitations become visible here, but I see no reason to  
assume that they have a significant impact on the outcome. Except for the  
fish smell.

> Since no one reacted except Olie himself, I will be
> bold. Whatever the outcome of the logo contest, if
> logo 124 is not in the top 10, there will be 11 logos
> in the top 10.

The votes that were added after the logo was changed were moved and the  
individual users contacted. What's your problem?

> And I also think the next international vote will need
> to be much better organised.

If there will be another international vote, I'll be sure to recommend you  
as an organizer.

Regards,

Erik