[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

[Jon Harald Søby]

On 9/18/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/17/06, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I personally would like rather to provide equal amount of information
> > to "every" language communities. I don't welcome nor that only English
> > editors can access the information about the people they are voting
> > for nor that there is enouous different of amount which voters can
> > consider between editors having English competence and not. It would
> > mean the elected one cannot represent the community as a whole, but
> > not only a part of it, community of a certain language, in the worst
> > case, I am afraid.
>
> Actually, the translation issue is a very strong argument against
> direct election of Board members.  Indirect election, via elected
> delegates at each project (or other appropriate grouping), would avoid
> much of this issue.  It would also curtail the "popularity effect" of
> enwiki -- we could use a diminishing-returns allocation of delegates
> to minimize the "hulking gorilla" effect that enwiki otherwise has on
> popular polling within Wikimedia.
>
> Kelly

Indirect elections is a terrible idea. Indirect elections are used in
a certain North-American country. It is an election type that allows a
war-mongering cowboy who stands for less gun control, less social
welfare programs, and who doesn't give a rat's ass about the
enviroment ("there is no such thing as a human-created enviroment
changes" my ass) to become the President even though he gets fewer
votes than the other candidate. This should have taught people a
lesson about indirect elections.

Besides allowing for minority vote candidates to be elected, this
system would not work in Wikimedia because you would first need to
have elections on who should be electors from each
language/project/etc. It would become a bureaucratic mess.

(PS! The above is just meant as an example on how an indirect election
can go (very) wrong, and not meant to start a political discussion; if
you have very strong feelings on the issue, don't reply to it here,
but rather on my private mail, if at all.)

-- 
Best regards,
Jon Harald Søby

Website - http://www.alqualonde.com/
Wikipedia - http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruker:Jhs
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