Wikipedia talk:Suffrage

Should VFD suffrage be formalized?

I see the advantage of being able to point new users (or potential socks) to a plain policy page that says they cannot vote on VFD (which of course does not prevent them from commenting). I see the disadvantage that setting strict rules makes it possible for people to 'game the system' (e.g. if N edits are required, to make precisely N+1 minor edits and then start voting). Radiant_>|< 08:11, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

I see the benefit of a formalized policy, as long as the bar isn't set too high. (For example, I'm pretty active (1600+ edits to date), but I was inelgible for the Board vote because I was cautious about editing until recently.) If the bar is set high enough (100+ edits) then the system gaming problem should decrease, and if accounts created after the start of the vote are prohibited, the sock problem should be eliminated. A question that occurs to me is: Should there be a system wide policy, or should there be a fallback policy that only involves votes where no other policy was set? -- Essjay · Talk 08:18, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

• System wide sounds good for consistency. However, we'd arguably need several levels, as the suffrage required to vote on local issues (such as VFD) should be less than that required to vote on global issues (such as policy proposals or board votes). It is debatable whether RFA is the former or the latter. I believe the simplest way of wording it is requiring X edits at the beginning of the vote - that would automatically invalidate any accounts created after the vote started.
• On most such debates it is already assumed that anonymous users can't vote (since an IP address can have been used by a wide variety of people, it's hard to check that). We should make a provision for users changing account names, but that is relatively rare anyway. Radiant_>|< 10:58, July 12, 2005 (UTC)
• Absolutely not. Pcb21| Pete 11:41, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
• I prefer to leave the standard ambiguous for VfD decisions. The current guideline and precedent is very useful but we need the ability to exercise judicial discretion based on the specific facts at hand. As you say, it is far to easy to game the system once a rigid standard is set. Allowing and expecting the closing admin to do some research is the best way to meet our community goal. I'm inclined to think that some ambiguity is also a good thing for the larger policy votes although I can understand that there is a greater need for a more structured guideline in those cases. VfD has a lot of precedent to draw on. Other policy votes, etc do not have as much and can benefit from a "sufferage" requirement. Rossami (talk) 12:10, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
• I believe the number of edits is coincidence rather than any strong indication: a large number of edits gives you an assurance of a legitimate user, but a small number of edits gives you nothing either way, going with the number of edits alone to identify active users will give you false negatives, and it can vary often for users when articles they edited to got deleted. I think the opposite a rule should be set firmly that the number of edits alone should never be used to exclude any user, except perhaps at a very base level (such as the 25 non-minor-edit-flagged article edits in the Vfu policy which seems somewhat reasonable). --Mysidia 13:13, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
• Establishing a strict suffrage policy runs counter to the openness with is required for Wikipedia to function effectively, IMO. It is my personal opinion that no suffrage requirements should exist, save the very obvious (no anon. votes, no votes from accounts that were created after the vote was begun). Beyond that, I agree, by and large, with what Rossami has said about leaving individual cases to the discretion of the admin. For global, high-profile votes, some gamed votes will probably slide through, but if the number of those is large enough to seriously throw the total, then there is in all likelihood a greater problem at work, and one that setting a strict suffrage requirement is going to do very little to allievate. – Seancdaug 13:15, July 12, 2005 (UTC)
• Concur with Rossami, Mysidia and Seancdaug (although anons can vote; admins can ignore said votes; see WP:GVFD.) Unless you can come up with some evidence that excessive sock/meatpuppet voting is actually causing some serious problems with admins accurately closing votes, I'd view this as bureauracracy creep. Soundguy99 13:39, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
  • It's not creep, nobody is as of yet proposing anything. This is just a gauge of public opinion (and discussion thereof) in reaction to the subject recently coming up in a number of places. Radiant_>|< 13:46, July 12, 2005 (UTC)
• I support this idea. Furthermore, I think the Suffrage would be a lot easier to "enforce" if Kate's Tool were expanded to include an edit count up to a specified date. That way, you can have a clear idea of how many edits a certain account made up to the time a vote was started. --Deathphoenix 13:54, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
  • Consider the case of the newly registered user, whose first action since being a long time anonymous contributor, is a vote on an issue. This user then continues to edit, and accumulates hundreds of good edits in the week or two before the vote closes. Why should anyone attempt to codify restrictions of the bureaucrat's ability to use their discretion and accept that vote? What if a recently registered anon can point to hundreds of edits under his static IP number? Voting is a primary factor in getting anonymous users to register in the first place. Let's be careful not to ruin that motivation. Unfocused 14:27, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
    • But isn't that already stigmatised in practise? On a VfD, for instance, if there is a new user who suddenly votes, people often include a bulleted comment below the vote stating that it is "User's 2nd edit" or something similar. I know the vote itself isn't invalidated, but vote closers often see that comment and ignore the vote by the new user. --Deathphoenix 15:37, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
      • The vote closer is easily able to establish whether the anon is contributing something useful to the debate. Knowing it is the second edit helps, but that is just one more tool that helps the admin make a good decision. If an admin is using that info as the be-all-and-all, then they shouldn't be trusted to close votes. Pcb21| Pete 17:19, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
        • Exactly. Edit count is just one factor in making a decision. I think it's a useful first-line filter. --Deathphoenix 17:58, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
• As a VFD closer of some debates where the result hangs in the balance, and there are some anonymous votes, I would prefer to not have a policy forbidding me from counting them. First, the VFD-tag invites users to contribute to the debate, anonymous or non-anonymus. Second, if an anonymous user makes a good point, it should be taken into consideration. Third, many of the anonymous votes are readers who don't regularly contribute, that is a big group of people who we are creating this encyclopedia for, there voice should be heard. The reason to discount anonymous votes is that they are often made in bad faith, often sockpuppetry. If I think that an anonymous vote was made in good faith (the usual sign of this is that the other votes are all from established users in good standing), it's counted by me. Finally, I think edit counting should be irrelevant, a persons vote does not become more valuable because he or she has many edits. Time since account creation may be relevant however as a guard against sockpuppetry (I treat such votes the same way as anonymous votes, and count them unless they were made in bad faith). Sjakkalle (Check!) 12:33, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
• Warning: editcountitis can be fatal. Fatal to the person counting their own edits and fatal to those that rely on counting another's edits for a gold-standard of something-or-other. It seems to me that sockpuppets/meatpuppets are an annoyance but not a restriction on how we do business, even on VfD. It doesn't take a lot of practise to spot one of either and any admin worth their rollback-button ought to be able to that with their metaphorical-eyes closed. Formalized suffrage says "we don't want to hear what you have to say" and "we don't trust you to say something sensible". We do not trust socks/meats, but we should trust new users who vote and edit in good-faith. As Sjakkalle says, we invite all users to come visit the VfD discussion and we shouldn't quietly have another policy that says they might not really be invited. So long as we make plain that only votes in good faith will be counted we are both flexible and welcoming at the same time. If we further make clearer than at present that socks/meats/anons etc are likely to attract claims of bad-faith and have their vote discounted, nobody can complain they weren't warned. -Splash 16:18, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
• Strong oppose per Sjakkalle. I registered as an editor for this site because one of my favorite articles was up for deletion, and I made several remarks in its debate that assisted in getting the article transwikied rather than deleted. I probably wouldn't have even registered, had I not seen that VfD tag and joined the debate (and joined several other debates I found interesting). Instead, well... I've been here for 8 months, I'm listed on Wikipedia:Confessed Wikipediholics, and I have over 2000 edits. Suffrage requirements definitely discourage new users from contributing, and all they do is add to a bureaucracy. WP:NOT a bureaucracy. --Idont Havaname 21:51, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

• There was mention of using time since account creation as an alternative measure to edit counts... How about also looking at possibility of adding more options.. a measure of sustained activity? Sustained activity being average edits over time, i.e. average non-reverted edits of significant size per day for the last 4 weeks. Requiring voters to have registered an e-mail address, to have a non-null user page, to have not clicked the "logout" button too often (when possibly switching between accounts), hmm; have we thought much about possible criteria other than mere counts of something?.. --Mysidia 03:32, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

Consistency

It can reasonably be assumed that whatever suffrage is the guideline for VFD, will also apply to IFD, CFD, TFD and RFD. It would be easiest (once we have consensus for that) for all those pages to link here. However, VFU presently has its own, very strict, suffrage criteria. Shouldn't those then be dropped to make it consistent with the rest of the lot? [Radiant]

The VfU criteria is wrong and should be changed back in line with all the others. Pcb21| Pete 17:14, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

• • Done now. Radiant_>|< 15:28, July 18, 2005 (UTC)

What about RFA? What about RFC endorsement? What about random votes about article style that occasionally pop up? Radiant_>|< 12:38, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

Well, it's good to have a set suffrage for the general case to be consistent. VFU has a very strict suffrage because VFU is a very specific case. Undeleting an article is fairly serious because it indicates that an admin (who is a trusted member of the community) deleted something out of process. If I were an admin, I'd rather know that my actions were decided to be out of process by a group of members that passed a suffrage. So, a general voting page could have a little note pointing to the general Suffrage page while another voting page that has more strict requirements may have its own Suffrage section (say, with the VFU, if it still requires a more strict suffrage than the general case). --Deathphoenix 13:53, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

• In the first place, the suffrage requirements for VfU don't seem all that strict to me. In the second place, since VfU is essentially an appeals court that is often concerned more with process than content or subject, discussion rather than counting votes is even more important there than on VfD and sock/meatpuppet voting is more disruptive. Plus, we need some way to prevent articles from simply ping-ponging between VfD and VfU. I've got no problem with the situation as it stands. As far as the rest of the questions go, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. IMHO, trying to institute a variety of suffrage policies is wandering perilously close to violating m:Foundation issues - specifically "Ability of anyone to edit articles without registering." True, voting is not editing, but still. . . . . Soundguy99 13:56, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Those whole proposal strikes me as unnecessary instruction creep →Raul654 15:32, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

• I don't see it as such. If this were okayed, it might actually reduce instruction creep. If it's decided that a particular vote needs a suffrage, instead of having to decide upon a suffrage for each vote, one can just slap on "This vote has a Wikipedia:Suffrage" (or something similar) on top of the vote page. Instead of wasting time deciding on a specific suffrage, the only thing we'd need to decide is if it needs a suffrage. --Deathphoenix 15:41, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
  • We don't need suffrage restrictions. Clueful admins with the experience to judge all comments on their merits are far better than any gamable system about edit counts. Thus it is instruction creep. Pcb21| Pete 17:14, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
    • Well, I suppose in that case, you could count it as instruction creep wrt admins using their judgement on a case. I personally think having a suffrage helps filter out the chaff. That's not to say that you should only use a suffrage while ignoring everything else. Making the suffrage the end all and be all is like putting all your security at the point of entry while having no security on the inside, which I disagree with. The suffrage represents the entry point. Anyone that passes that first entry point can go through the scrutiny of any admin who wants to interpret the user's vote. --Deathphoenix 17:57, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

• Consistency would be a good thing: consistently no formal suffrage rules apart from a requirement that the vote be in good-faith from a user acting in good-faith. Although VfU serves the more subtle purpose of providing a check on process, it is enough of a backwater that, at present, socks don't go there much. When they do, they are just as easily identifiable as they are everywhere else. Frequently, however, someone wants an article undeleted because "they think all the VfD votes were wrong" or similar. They get "keep deleted, valid VfD" votes very quickly. This is more just a misunderstanding of the purpose of VfU (which, imho, is not stated nearly clearly or prominently enough) than sockpuppetry or the like. -Splash 16:26, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

History of sockpuppetry

Pcb21 made a change to the wording of one of the paragraphs on this page. See this diff. Based on my own recollection, sockpuppetry was always a problem. Sockpuppets were used to attempt to bias discussion threads, obscure the obviousness of edit wars, etc. It did not appear to me to have been caused solely or even primarily by the community's increased reliance on voting. I am going to revert the paragraph to the previous version because it is closer the way I remember the problem evolving. Would others who have also been watching the changes in our community processes also please comment? Rossami (talk) 18:24, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

"Some people assert..." - this wording is unacceptable. It is like poor attempt to write in an NPOV style, but in the Wikipedia namespace!

I know Radiant! doesn't necessarily know because he wasn't there, but you should know better. Sockpuppetry has sprung everywhere in the last year or two as voting has spread. VfD has had supposed-consensus-reaching-that-is-actually-more-like-voting for longer, and so was an early breeding ground for sockpuppets. And coincidentally, probably the most disliked page on Wikipedia!

But in short, if this page is to become a useful guideline, that passage has got to change. Pcb21| Pete 21:13, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Suffrage for moving?

IIRC there was some talk about a minimum number of edits required to use the 'move' button. Does someone know the specifics about this maybe? Radiant_>|< 07:05, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

Are you talking about the various bits of weaponry against page move vandalism? Or some other proposal, related to seniority? Pcb21| Pete 07:23, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

• I seem to recall the move button only working if you had more than X edits, or that option being proposed. But I couldn't find it, hence the question. Radiant_>|< 08:17, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

Tim Starling should be able to answer the question, as all these bits of code tend to be written by him. It certainly isn't turned at the moment, but I suspect it could be flicked on at a moment's notice by a dev if someone starts on a spree of WoW-style page move vandalism. Pcb22 08:48, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia talk:Requested moves/Min edit count, it prevented page moves by the newest 1% of registered accounts. When I registered about a month ago, it was still on, and it took about two or three days before I could move pages. —Cryptic (talk) 13:23, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

I just registered a new account now, and it is off. Likely that it got turned off during the 1.5 upgrade, I guess. Pcb23 13:41, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

It was never a permanent measure, but just one of many things the developers do in their battles against page move vandals. Since page move vandalism is less database intensive in 1.5 than it was previously, the need to limit page moves has decreased, which is possibly why this measure is not currently on. Angela. 02:37, July 15, 2005 (UTC)

Suffrage on Requests for Adminship

There has never been a formal policy regarding sufferage on WP:RFA, though likely socks are almost always discounted. My policy when closing a nomination and deciding whether or not to promote is to discount any votes by people who are uninvolved in Wikipedia. Usually this is very clear, because it is unusual for new users to make RFA votes. The majority of votes are made by people who follow adminship matters regularly. Most are nearly qualified for adminship themselves if they do not already have it.

RFA is, historically consensus-driven, with the 75%/80% guideline being only a way to quantify consensus. In a close vote I consider the rationale for the vote, if stated, as well as the prior voting history of the voter. In establishing consensus I am less likely to consider voters who apply criteria well outside the mainstream, such as unusually high edit count requirements. I am also less likely to consider votes made by people who nearly always vote the same way on adminship nominations (such as those who only ever vote "oppose"). On the other hand, I'm likely to consider more strongly those votes that are accompanied by clear, plausible reasoning for the vote.

Other bureaucrats may apply other criteria.

The Uninvited Co., Inc. 20:47, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Wording in "informal" section

I changed the sentence reading "This means that, while anyone can vote, votes can be discounted if they are made by a user with a lack of edit history, or a probable sockpuppet" to "This means that, while anyone can vote, votes can be discounted or given less weight if they are made by a user with a lack of edit history, or a probable sockpuppet." My change was reverted, with the explanation that "discounted" and "given less weight" mean the same thing. While i think the reversion was entirely reasonable, i disagree. Discounted, in my mind, means "counted for nothing" or having no effect. "Given less weight", on the other hand, means counted for less than other votes, but not entirely discounted. Since i think votes by new users and sockpuppets are sometimes discounted and other times given less, but at least some, weight than other users' votes, i prefer my wording of the sentence. - Jersyko talk 21:20, July 15, 2005 (UTC)

I've already re-edited it to read similar to what you intended, which I believe is the correct interpretation. Unfocused 02:50, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

Suffrage for policy proposals?

A recent policy proposal (on CSD) had a strict suffrage requirement (of >250 edits by the time the voting started). This was intended to set a clear bar, and to prevent disputes when the voting closed, such as "these votes are invalid so the proposal passes" vs. "no, THOSE votes are invalid so the proposal fails". And also, since the Wikimedia Board Vote used a similar (but harsher) criterion, it seemed like a good idea at the time. This suffrage was disputed, but in the end it didn't make any difference to the outcome so this can hardly be taken as a precedent either way. Of course we rarely have large formal proposals, so whenever the next one is a suffrage may be decided upon then. Radiant_>|< 10:25, July 20, 2005 (UTC)