The problem is based on size. Germany has an area of around 138,000 square miles, and has around 82 million people. California alone has 163,000 or so square miles of area, bigger than Germany, but only around 32 million people, meaning it has a much larger area for far fewer people. And that's just one state out of 50. There are significant cultural differences between Louisiana and New Jersey, for instance. A US national chapter is not necessarily able to adequately represent that. Not to mention, the individual states in the US are so large and autonomous they act almost at the same level as other countries throughout the world. -Dan On May 1, 2008, at 1:45 PM, Ziko van Dijk wrote:

2008/5/1 Dan Rosenthal <swatjester(a)gmail.com>om>: Well - the differences between say Bawaria and Branderburg are quite high as well. Traveling by a plane from LA to NY and traveling by train from Frankfurt on Oder to Munich takes similar amount of time. I guess it is even easier to travel from LA to NY than from Franfurt on Oder to Munich :-) -- Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.poli.toya.net.pl http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 2:52 AM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester(a)gmail.com> wrote: For gathering people locally it sounds a good reason, particularily regarding to incentive to form up Birgitte brought up, but still there are many nationwide organizations in the United States of America? Not persuasive. Specially regarding to representation for selecting chapter-seats It may go only for US residents - for the rest of the world, sorry, it isn't too significant to distinguish from each other. -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 7:52 PM, effe iets anders <effeietsanders(a)gmail.com> wrote: There are significant problems related mostly to area of covering. WM Serbia was organized quickly because maybe more than 80% of people interested in chapter are living in Belgrade metropolitan area (2M of inhabitants; Serbia has something more than 7M of inhabitants), which is well connected by public transport. Outside of Belgrade we had a lot of problems to organize anything sensible. Even in the two next cities by size (200-300K) we had a lot of problems to make any kind of sustainable organization. Slovenians, for example, have a problem because the most important Wikimedians are all over Slovenia and they are not able to have regular meetings. Because of that, they realized that they should organize themselves formally through Slovenian LUG. Canadian Wikimedians have the similar problem. There are ~35M of Canadians at the territory of the second largest country in the world. I may imagine that out of big cities they may have a lot of problems in organizing chapters at the province level. I heard that even Polish Wikimedians have problem in making regular meetings. They also have a lot of significant contributors all over Poland. And, unlike Germany, Poland doesn't have a good amount of good highways and railways. So, I really think that it is not rationally to think about one US chapter. The similar applies for other big countries. However, it *may* be reasonable to organize national level chapters in, for example, Russia, China and Brazil. People are concentrated around big cities and there is not yet a well enough Internet infrastructure all over those countries. However, those chapters should make a plan how to initiate subchapters; i.e., to federalize their own chapter. The same process, but from a particular chapters to the federation at the national level may be applied to US chapters. (Yes, it is good to have one common body inside of one country.) At the other side, I really don't think that WMF should work as "Wikimedia USA", too. Its role is to be the common body to all of the chapters and Wikimedians and it should leave national level organization to some other people.

effe iets anders wrote: I fully agree with Lodewijk. Incidentally, if the system incorporates some kind of proportionality - though I don't know what I would recommend - that would go some distance toward discouraging splitting up a chapter just to get more votes. --Michael Snow

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 2:02 PM, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb(a)yahoo.com> wrote: The WMF is incorporated in Florida. The US doesn't handle incorporations.