On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 9:07 AM, Birgitte SB birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
--- On Wed, 5/14/08, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
From: Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Pointing out to an oddity To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 10:55 AM On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Kwan Ting Chan ktc@ktchan.info wrote:
On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 17:12 +0200, elisabeth bauer
wrote:
I don't see any candidates on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Candidates
(the place where I would expect candicacies to
show up)
Candidate's submission is on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Candidates/Submissions .
Once the close of candidate submission period comes round, the election
committee will transfer the listings of those that are
verified to be
eligible to the page you linked to, and translation
will also begin.
Wily D wrote:
Apparently we're not supposed to know that
they exist yet - I don't
know why.
They are available on the submission page if one want
to see it. The
committee would just prefer they not be as visibly
available until we
have confirmed the candidates meet the eligibility
criteria and that
their candidate submission meet the election
regulation. This is partly
to ensure fairness to all those who stand. Say a
candidate submission is
too long (as has been the case a couple of time), it
does take time for
them to correct it. In the mean time, if it were all
widely visible, the
other candidates can/will complain about unfair
advantages gained over
the exposure to the longer statement.
KTC
Then you should remove submissions that are too long (that part at least is trivial to check), or take less time promoting the ones that are okay, or handle all submissions in private. However, hiding all of the ongoing submissions on a somewhat hard to find subpage is not a good answer in my opinion. Seeing who intends to stand for the elections and why has an important influence on recruiting others.
Incidentally, my instinct was the same as WilyD's, and I added another link to the submissions page prior to seeing this discussion.
I imagine keeping submissions private would hurt translation efforts. I don't see the harm in having them somewhere hard to find so they are available to be worked on before they are advertised as being available.
You missed my point. If they are going to be kept online, then I think they should be easy to find as this encourages further participation in the process. Incomplete or problematic submissions might be handled offline, but in my opinion, the completed submissions should be publicized on an ongoing basis to encourage others to think seriously about participating in the process before the close of the candidate submission window.
-Robert Rohde