[Foundation-l] Unable to vote

Mon Jun 2 20:13:44 UTC 2008

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> :-(
>
> I think we should in the future do away with edit-based suffrage
> requirements in favor of something else.  First, being an editor with N
> edits is hardly what we are really looking for... what we are looking
> for is "responsible people actually associated with our community".
> Second, there are many of those people who, like Austin or some of the
> developers, are unable to vote because they have been doing other
> incredibly useful stuff.
>
> I would almost go so far as to say that suffrage should go to project
> admins, completely ignoring edit count.

Adminship is politicized on all the larger projects, causing a lot of
experienced, competent, deeply invested users to have zero interest in
adminship.  It's a mismatch.

The point of the edit count limit is to include all regular editors
not just a cabal, but to add some friction against someone minting a
lot of sock accounts. Its fine that it includes a few crazy people,
since they should be offset by the large number of fairly sane people.

Between the limit and the implicit checkuser that happens to all
voters, it seems to be doing a reasonable job at preventing sock mob
voting.  As far as enabling all contributors: It's nearly impossible
to be around regularly editing for a year or so and not make that
many... and if you haven't and want to you can easily crank out that
many in a few days (I think Domas did this).

For developers/sysadmins/meta-pedians  you could simply create an
additional rule as was done for staff. I don't think many people would
object to a rule making that that says "If you have SVN checkin to the
mediawiki ,SVN or  if you have elevated access to the foundation
servers, or if you've made 400 posts to the foundation's lists, or if
you've billed more than 400 hours to the WMF,  you can vote".