[Foundation-l] Voting suffrage criteria (established members should be able to vote)

Mon Jun 23 04:24:34 UTC 2008

I don't agree with the solution proposed, but the situation illustrates 
more generally some of the problems with our election system. Let me 
provide another illustration.

We had a meetup this past week attended by a number of people involved 
in Wikimedia projects. The group included several researchers who have 
worked on Wikipedia, studied its social dynamics, especially how 
policies are used and applied, and presented papers to academic 
conferences on these issues. These are people with a good understanding 
of the community and I think they would be well-suited to participate 
intelligently in the process of choosing board members. Nevertheless, 
some of these same people do not actually have enough edits to vote in 
the election, even though they've studied the community more closely 
than most of those who did vote.

Over time, the elections are also showing the same edit-count creep that 
manifests itself in the selection of administrators on mature projects. 
The effect is to increasingly exclude people who should have been 
considered part of the community. I don't have easy solutions for how to 
address this while still preventing manipulation through sockpuppet 
accounts and the like, but this is one reason we added a second method 
for the community to choose board members through the chapter selection 
process. In the chapter setting, participation is more clearly related 
to individual identity, and it goes some distance toward offering the 
membership system that was originally contemplated, whose failure to 
implement some people still lament.

--Michael Snow