I don't know whether this is relevant here or only in T287023: Sending two mass emails to eligible voters for the board elections 2021, but just in case, I'll mention the need to skip bot accounts.

In previous years the requirement that the voter not be a bot has been implemented by rejecting the user when they attempt to vote, based on whether they have the "bot" user right on the local wiki on which they jump from. So if a user has the "bot" right on one wiki, and does not have it on another wiki, they may vote by going to the other wiki. This would seem to be supported by the language of the eligibility criteria, although it's likely that technical requirements informed the criteria rather than the criteria informing the implementation.

Note that edits made on a wiki in which the user is a bot do count towards the edit count criteria. So a bot on en.wikipedia.org could attach an account on some random wiki, say lt.wikipedia.org, and may then vote from lt.wikipedia.org on the strength of their bot edits made on en.wikipedia.org. It would make more sense if bot accounts were disqualified if they have the bot right on any attached wiki.

For the purposes of sending emails, we will have a global user list of voters qualified by edit counts alone, including bots and blocked users. In previous elections, emails were apparently sent to all users on this list. To exclude bots, we could check bot rights on all attached accounts as we extract email addresses from the global user list. Thus we would not send emails to bots even if they are qualified under the loophole discussed above.

Or we could disqualify bots by removing them from the global voter list if they have bot rights anywhere, taking a broader definition of a bot and closing the loophole. Then such bots would naturally not receive a notification and would not be allowed to vote.

Note that bot rights can change. A user might be a bot now, but cease to be a bot before the election. We could disqualify users who are bots now, and consider on a case-by-case basis whether to allow users who cease to be bots, if they make a request to an election administrator.

populateEditCount.php status:

• enwiki is still running, it's done 25M of 42M users.
• s3 got stuck for a while on loginwiki. I killed it, since loginwiki only has 37 edits in total. Now it's up to mediawikiwiki.

populateEditCount.php is done. The next step is makeGlobalVoterList.php which I'll start soon. It should be much quicker than populateEditCount.php.

Election committee says: do not change the qualification rules for bots at this stage. I have a script almost ready which will find all bots globally and add them to a SecurePoll list. I think I'll run it and use it for email filtering, but it will not affect qualifications.

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2021-08-06T03:54:06Z] <tstarling@deploy1002> Synchronized php-1.37.0-wmf.17/extensions/SecurePoll/cli/wm-scripts/makeGlobalVoterList.php: need to run this script T288025 (duration: 00m 57s)