Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Archive/Stop allowing site bans to render editors ineligible to vote in WMF board elections

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Stop allowing site bans to render editors ineligible to vote in WMF board elections

NoN Proposes a social/policy change rather than a technical feature

  • Problem: Currently site bans render an editor ineligible to vote in WMF board elections. This is despite the growing realisation by the WMF that on some of its site – particularly smaller and outlying sites – indeffs are handed out to users who might, for example, have a disagreement with an admin, or might criticise attitudes of other editors, might be wrongly suspected of being a sockpuppet (surprisingly difficult to disprove), or take sides in political ructions such as the China–Hong Kong imbroglio and the Croation WP issue. There must be quite a few other examples.
  • Who would benefit: The whole community benefits if the WMF stops outsourcing voter eligibility to single admins on any site. Some blocks might well target vandals and others who probably are not going to make positive contributions to the movement; but we all know that blocks are multi-faceted and sometimes unjust – and typically resistant to appeal, without representation but in full public view in the manner of a show trial. It's difficult to see why editors who are blocked on one or even more than one site while having contributed and continuing to contribute positively on others for many years should be caught up in this one-size-fits-all net.
  • Proposed solution: End the criterion that denies suffrage in this way.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Tony (talk) 09:03, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

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