<snip my desire for an alternative to a proportionally representative Wikicouncil>
Wikicouncil would certainly be a possible body to oversee overall day-to-day operations. It could function in addition to a governing Board AND and advisory board.
< snip governing Board >
<snip advisory Board>
A Wikicouncil needs to represent three broad groups: languages, countries and overall projects. It needs to avoid domination by any one group or sub-group, and at the same time it needs to avoid becoming so large as to become unwieldy. The size of the Wikicouncil can be open-ended but still include policies to slow the growth.
Compare this paragraph with your openinig sentance: "Wikicouncil would certainly be a possible body to oversee overall day-to-day operations." I am sorry but I do not believe all this would be effective. I doubt it is possible to actually assemble a group as described above, and I am confident such a group could not oversee day-to-day operations.
Groups and sub-groups all need a large degree of autonomy, and a higher level of governance should have its right to impose policies clearly restricted. The recommended governance scheme for sub-groups needs to vary in relation to the size of the group.
For countries it would be easy to suggest one seat for each national chapter as the initial model, but this could change as the chapter idea becomes more developed. Currently there is still only a handful of chapters concentrated in countries with functional education systems and internet access, and no account is taken of the size or etnic diversities of countries. I think that issues such as whether US representation should be allocated to states or judicial districts or whether Belgium should have separate French and Flemish representatives will need to wait for a later stage of development.
For projects, size matters. Number of articles is an easy metric to work with for the sake of these comments. A metric that also reflects active membership and the number of megabytes of data in a project may be more accurate if it can be developed. I could allow for the fact that Wiktionay finds stubs perfectly acceptable, or in Wikisource it could cope with decisions of whether a given book is all on one page or divided into chapters.
Basing this on the completely arbitrary metric of 25,000 main namespace articles in a language on any project with that many articles would be guaranteed one seat on the Wikicouncil. Smaller languages within that project would be able to combine their numbers to receive one seat for each 25,000 articles. Larger languages within a project on a sliding, perhaps logarithmic, scale.
These paragraghs describe a very complicated logistical mess. And this is just about assigning seats! Think about how what the actual elections would entail. Every sub-group must decide on citizenship; are dual citizens allowed; how far can one subproject's policy in this regard veer from the median of the rest. Then the elections must actually be conducted and counted, but those editiors who normally count such things will probably be running so who may perform the duties of striking sockpuppets etc. Then we must find election auditors with appropriate language skills, or we can take it all at face value and hope the whole first session of the Wikicouncil isn't overrun by accusations of false elections. After all that, we will have a WikiCouncil which I believe will be ineffective. And honestly, it will be mostly made up of people who are buearacrats on a sub-project.
I must ask is proportional representation really worth the effort? Even if the effort is half what I believe it will be, do you really believe the results will be surprising, that these representatives will not be current leaders within projects? If you do not believe the effort is a problem in itself, how do you feel about how much time it will take to execute these elections?
Is it not possible to gather a diversity of viewpoints and leaders with any easier or more effective method? Do the editors really need to be "represented" or do they just need to have a designated person (or group) to approach with larger questions?
Please think for a moment about the origins of proportional representation. It was designed to make sure everyone had a voice in a situation where communication was a real problem. I mean people had to travel great distances (without airplanes!) to meet and communicate. It is the lack of *organized* communication which I believe is our problem. Not the lack of ability. After all we are speaking about *wikis* here. Every single editor (barring language) is able to communicate directly with a Board Member if they so chose. The development of proportional representation in order to give editors of a *wiki* their "voice" in these matters is one of the largest wastes of effort I have ever heard of. I am sorry to be so critical of ideas many of you have been working a long time on, but the more details I hear of this model the more confident I am that it would be buearacracy for its own sake. What we need is a simple organization that allows the leaders from sub-projects to collaborate with one another and with the Foundation. We need a "chain of accountabilty" to ensure problems are solved or passed on up to until they reach the board (with the research already done!). We do not need a goverment. I think we could build something workable from the base of the Apache model. I am sure there are also other models we could work from instead. However, I do not believe a parlamentary goverment is one of them.
Birgitte SB
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