This article is obviously not from SVpov, i.e. Tim Starling's own view.
Vile mailing list posts [1] and [2] are evidence of failures of the code, that may be evidence of deliberate ditching of votes.
- I was very annoyed about that. The problem was that Hashar decided our code would be more efficient if we used single quotes everywhere instead of double quotes. So he converted the whole code base and uploaded the new code immediately, and in the process randomly broke features everywhere. The voting feature was broken such that it would get a fatal PHP error on submission, and return a blank page. It did this for everyone who attempted to vote, for maybe a day or two. I was angry, because I knew would damage the credibility of the vote and of my software. This is in my opinion a strong argument in favour of having the vote conducted on a separate secure server with a static code base.
- The bug was fixed shortly after it was reported, and Danny and Imran decided not to extend the voting period. They did this without influence from me. -- Tim Starling 16:46, 27 Jun 2004 (EEST)
- It seems like an example of developer vigilantiism by English Wikipedia User Hashar too.
This comment from an edit on board vote code was probably more interesting as a summary than the article itself: "1. who cares who runs Wikimedia, it's crooked 2. it's who gets to vote that's the main issue 3. ordinary people can't audit this mess 4. vandals and libellers control the code"
- Isn't it more correct to call this the "MediaWiki approval vote" feature?