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

Mon Jun 23 16:12:01 UTC 2008

John; Your observation is all inclusive except, including my observation of 
the constitutional provision for "congress to coin money and regulate the 
value thereof". This was set out in the constitution as Ratified "In the 
Year of our Lord" 1787. If we can return to that course we may salvage the 
fruits of our endeavors from the terrorists bankers who, for printing our 
own money, relieve us of over on billion dollars a day, called "interest on 
the debt" Ron
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Vandenberg" <jayvdb at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 22, 2008 10:41 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Voting suffrage criteria (established 
membersshould be able to vote)


> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net> 
> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Knowing about the community is not the same as having contributed free
> content to the world.
>
> 600 edits is simple.  It equates to about 10 hours worth of copy and
> pasting on English Wikisource; a task any novice could do.  The same
> can be achieved in a few hours with AWB on Wikipedia (although the
> tasks to perform are a bit harder to find these day on English
> Wikipedia), or a few days on New page patrol.  On Commons,
> [[Category:Media needing categories as of 18 November 2007]] has 425
> images, which could be mostly cleared with a few hours using the
> HotCat Gadget.
>
> --
> John
>
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