Can someone explain to me why Wikipedia, while it clearly possesses secure, anonymous on-wiki voting software (used for Foundation elections), fails to use it for Arbcom? Is it that people want to see which way the wind is blowing before they vote, or that after the fact, voting decisions will be used for petty vendettas? Is it to ensure that back-room vote swapping is honored? Why?

Of course, Jimbo has gone out of his way to restate the "monarchist" nature of WP, and note that he can override the will of "the people" if he wants. So perhaps this isn't really even a vote at all, but a beauty contest. Silly me.

Good question, gomi. I have another concern that somewhat relates to yours.

What's to stop me from creating socks months ago and getting them up in edits just to stuff the ballot box? No such thing as voter registration to stop that kind of shenanigans!

In XFDs, isn't using socks or calling for reinforcements considered "vote stacking?" Unless CheckUser is used on every single voter in this election, how would anyone know who's socking? Giano and the Troubles crew caused him a lot of grief last year with voter fraud.

Yes, the bar of 150 main-space edits is pretty low these days, especially given automated tools. I personally know of at least three sock-runners who voted with 4-6 socks each in last year's election, just to see if they could. None of them got caught, to the best of my knowledge. This may not be enough to sway the results, but then who knows how much of it is going on?

I know of two sockmasters who got caught on the ArbCom election (Vintagekits and David Lauder).

The thing is, if they did preemptive CU's of all voters, wouldn't the feeling of many WR (and WP) users be that it's a massive privacy invasion?

The bar is much too low. I'd say something more like 500 mainspace edits to vote, and 5,000 mainspace edits to stand as a candidate (and at least 1,000 of them within the last year). People should have a substantial amount of editing experience before they get involved in wikipolitics, and in any case having a high bar is a pretty effective way to deter sockpuppetry. I also think voters should be rigorously subjected to checkuser, particularly with the bar currently being so low.

(I support public voting, by the way--in the context of the project's culture, it's more suitable and healthy.)

I prefer public voting in this instance. I know that last election I was able to sway a few voters by hearing their reasons for opposing me and then discussing it with the voter on his or her talkpage. I think it helps to have that dialogue with voters and makes for a better process overall.

Five thousand mainspace edits? I have 2137 mainspace edits according to Kate's Tool or 3626 total and 653 recent according to this analysis by Franamax

Are you seriously suggesting that I be disqualified from running from ArbCom? Since I sometimes write entire articles in one edit that's rather a high bar. Or an encouragement to fire up AWB to do some needless and trivial edit or another to a wide swath of articles to pad the count. Surely that's not a good thing. I suggest that one article from scratch is worth a hundred AWB edits or more.

Look, I agree that some mainspace editing experience is important, even vital. I won't support candidates who have little or none. But I'd say with 1 FA, 3 GAs and closing on 40 DYKs (each of which represents a brand new article I wrote myself), I have plenty. So your metric is lacking something.


Yes. and I think this election's trend toward pre-voting places to discuss views Template:ACE_2008_guides is likely to turn out even better. We're up to 10 and counting.

You get more drama that way.


Those policies would ensure that for all intents and purposes, only vandalism patrollers would be eligible to run. Some of Wikipedia's best content editors have relatively low mainspace edit counts because they write entire articles offline or in user space, and then insert them fully-formed into article space with a single edit. Somehow, I think authoring 5000 articles should not be a minimum requirement.

Everyone knows that the editors with the highest article space edit counts are vandalism patrollers; any rule that favor edit count and especially edit count in article space will preference vandalism patrollers. If there is a group of Wikipedians most unlike the deliberative, thoughtful content creator that I would think you would favor for the ArbCom, it's the teenaged vandalism patroller, playing Whack-A-Vandal with automated tools, seeking to Level Up as quickly as possible.

True, and besides, it's a vital part of the all-important MMORPG aspect of the project.

What is stopping you? It's easily done and there would be mass outcry if everyone was CUd in an attempt to prevent this.

Maybe it's too much, but I'd still say a candidate should have at least 2500-3000 edits, and I think requiring 1000 in the last year is pretty fair (that's only about 3 mainspace edits per day). I wouldn't vote against someone because they only had 2000 edits, but I think it would improve the entire process to have a relatively high bar. I think you need quite a bit of editing experience to properly judge the kinds of cases that come before the ArbCom. A big problem with the current ArbCom is that most of them just aren't very serious editors; some of them, like James F., hardly qualify as editors at all. At one point I described article editing as a kind of necessary continuing education for arbitrators, and I think electing an arbitrator who isn't a serious content editor is like having a judge who's never been to law school.

Besides, we have too many candidates, and it's useful to have some requirements that exclude the frivolous candidates so everyone can focus on the ones that actually deserve consideration.

Another obvious side effect is that this year, voters have used the election to smear people in favor of their preferred candidates.

So Ryan Postlethwaite wrote a load of bullshit about Cool Hand Luke "outing" someone, to scupper his bid - and onlookers who don't know any better have taken the bait. Luke was in the top 6 candidates until Postlethwaite dropped his hokey anchor, now he's drifted out of the race.

But that's WP for you. Especially at election time - the really silly season. Any opportunity to publicly hurl invective and baseless defamatory comments to gain political influence is gleefully taken.