Requests for comment/Voting in bg.wikinews by non-contributors

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Recently, an editor in BG Wikipedia opened a voting in BG Wikinews. In its description, he specified that editors in Wikipedia will also be eligible to vote, even if they don't have contributions to Wikinews. I believe that this is a violation of the established practices in WMF projects - to require contributions to a project in order to be eligible to vote in it.

I kindly ask for your opinion on that matter. -- Григор Гачев (talk) 23:50, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

It would be fair to let the people also know the context: the voting in question itself and also Proposals for closing projects/Deletion of Bulgarian Wikinews. And it would also be fair to point out how three months ago you counted as “valid” some of the same votes you now claim to be “[in] violation of the established practices in WMF projects”. Granted, back then those votes were in support of your proposal. Last but not least, speaking of “established practices”, it is, in fact, a de facto practice on the small Bulgarian-language projects—at least on bgwiktionary, bgquote, and bgsource (I think it's safe to add bgbooks too)—to allow and accept the votes of the editors who are eligible to vote on bgwiki. BTW, this is also how I was elected as a sysop on bgnews as well.
— Luchesar • T/C 16:54, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

A note: As Luchesar knows, I violated the WMF practices three months ago for a reason: I was the only editor in bgwikinews then, and considered too authoritarian to vote just myself. So I invited editors from other projects, without knowing if their votes will support the proposal. Now bgwikinews already has active editors, and I see no need anymore to invite non-contributors - eg. to decide on deleting over 1200 articles from it. (The motive of the editor who defined the voting as open to non-contributors was "due to the fact that the project is in practice dead". This is not true: its mainspace activity for the last couple of months is rather good for a wikinews project.)

Another part of the context: The current voting, at this moment, shows why allowing non-contributors to vote is generally not a good idea:

• all voting editors who contribute to bgwikinews are against the deletion of the articles
• all voting editors who support the deletion of the articles have no contributions to bgwikinews, prior to beginning of the voting (one since then made some edits, to demonstrate that he is able to circumvent the contributions requirement "in just 1 minute")
• most voting editors who are for the deletion of the articles also backed several months ago the notion to terminate the project without giving it a chance to be revived (Luchesar was one of them)

I wanted to keep the question clearly defined and about the principles, but if context is to be given, I believe that it should reflect all sides of the situation. -- Григор Гачев (talk) 15:32, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

Cannot disagree with “it should reflect all sides of the situation”. But withholding the context “to keep the question clearly defined and about the principles” remains—given the case specifics—misleading at best. And for those who would find the linked discussions above too TL;DR-ish, here's a (relatively) brief comment to put everything into perspective:

“ all voting editors who contribute to bgwikinews are against the deletion of the articles ”

That's true. But it is worth explaining who these—all in all three—“contributing editors” are:

1. Stanqo has a long history of deliberate efforts to abuse the projects, particularly bgwiki in the past, using them to spread false news and disinformation. The details are in the comments section of the project deletion proposal.
2. You, Grigor, have admitted to being connected with the speshno.info website:
   • Your bot, Ботчо, has uploaded in 2009–2013 at least 1239 articles from the said site, which also link back to it.
   • The voting in question is exactly about these articles, the proposal being for them to be deleted from bgnews.
   • speshno.info has been banned on bgwiki alongside numerous other sites as an anonymous, unreliable news source. These bans were introduced in response to the revelations of Stanqo's abuse of Wikipedia.
   • The articles on speshno.info indeed have no authors and the site itself lists no contact information beyond an anonymous email address for advertisers.
   • The latter also begs some questions, as even with a rel="nofollow" attribute the links from Wikinews still generate impressions for speshno.info when the visitors click on them. It's not unreasonable to expect that bg.wikinews.org is (much) more popular (~20K monthly views according to WMF stats) than the 6,701,732^nd Alexa-ranked speshno.info. This means that apart from the other problems, the site may also be benefiting unfairly from Wikinews popularity.
   • Worth noting is that speshno.info lists cross-bg.net (which redirects to cross.bg) and glasove.com as its partner websites. Both sites have been listed as spreading Russian state-sponsored propaganda in the blog of Ivo Indzhev, a notable Bulgarian political journalist and author, specializing in the Bulgaria-Russia relations, who has also contributed to the EEAS East StratCom Task Force disinformation reports.
   • A relatively less important, but still notable problem was the fact that the articles apparently were copied in violation of the website copyright: as late as 2016, articles copied 7 years earlier, in 2009, still had only the “All rights reserved” notice in the website's footer. Because the archive.org snapshots are rather sparse, it's hard to tell when the CC-BY license was finally added, but I have reasons to suspect it happened only after George Ho have noticed and reported the problem a few months ago (I'd like to once more express my gratitude to him for being the first to publicly raise the issue with the long-neglected problems of the Bulgarian Wikinews and for his continuing efforts to solve these problems ever since).
   • Finally, as noted by StanProg—who has initiated the voting—some articles copied to Wikinews had been previously copied from ekipnews.com. This makes the licensing problems even more complicated, but also, while ekipnews.com itself is slightly less anonymous (they give a postal address), it still seems far from a trustworthy news source. The website also makes rather dubious claims, like listing the European Commission and the European Union (!) as “[its] partners”.
3. Zelenkroki is the only editor who opposed the proposal whom I can't really criticize (although she was, in fact, the author of an article on Wikinews that in my opinion constituted an unfair and rather pitiful attack—effectively coming from Wikinews itself—on the Bulgarian News Agency). I've met her a couple of times and know her as a very kind and intelligent person. But I think she's also rather close friends with you, Grigor. While I'd like to think that this friendship has not affected her judgement, I cannot entirely exclude this possibility either—and can't even blame her if it is true, as this is quite normal (one may even say “noble”) and expected human behaviour that I can largely at least empathize with.

Obviously, I'd still urge everyone who would like to give their opinion to first read at least the voting that prompted this RfC and, if possible, also the Bulgarian Wikinews deletion proposal and the other linked discussions above.
— Luchesar • T/C 18:39, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

It is not acceptable for people who do not edit in Wikinews to vote in the project. --Stanqo (talk) 17:06, 20 July 2019 (UTC)