Lars Aronsson (that's me) wrote:
The requirement for voting in these board elections
has been at
least 400 edits in a single project over at least 90 days. The
number of voters have increased from 1484 (2005) to 4170 (2007).
But I find no information on meta how many voters were eligible.
So I did a little analysis of the database dumps. It appears that
we would have 800 eligible voters on the Swedish Wikipedia. I've
only counted usernames (not IPs) with at least 400 edits, and I
have excluced usernames that contain "bot". However, I have not
removed sock puppets or recently created accounts, so I could be
off a little, but not by an order of magnitude. However, the
democratic aspect is evident in this comparison:
Language Worldwide Eligible Speakers Admins W/A
speakers wikipedians /Wikipedian
Icelandic 300,000 54 5,500 24 2
Swedish 10,000,000 800 12,500 81 10
Danish 6,000,000 245 24,500 38 6
Arabic 422,000,000 197 2,140,000 14 14
The Arabic Wikipedia could maybe use a few more admins. With only
five more they would have one admin for every ten eligible voters,
just like the Swedish Wikipedia. But then they need to recruit,
recruit, recruit. Only 197 contributors have done more than 400
edits. All Arabic countries can't be all that poor, computer
illiterate or censored. You could probably double that number by
only recruiting students at U.S. universities, not to mention
France. Print some posters and brochures in Arabic.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se