Anthere:
Second, the participation rate of languages have been very diversed. English participants represented a huge number of voters. German were second and french third. Other languages had basically not participated but for a very few people. Link : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image%3AElection_participation2.png
Yes, that's a very good point. The graph you link to does not actually show the participation *rate*, but the number of participants per language. It might be interesting to compare this against, say, the number of very active contributors per language in June 2004:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt100.htm
Doing this, we get the following rates (roughly, as I'm reading the number of votes per language from the graph):
41% EN 41% DE 91% FR 20% JA 32% NL 75% ZH 17% PL 31% IT etc.
Taking just these languages, English and German had average rates, but the French participation rate was extraordinary by any measure. Japanese and Polish in particular were depressingly low. Hopefully, Datrio and Britty will be able to help with that.
In general, I can only really think of one solution -- getting the relevant text translated into as many languages as possible. For the sake of fairness, we should announce the election in the same location in all languages (e.g. Recent Changes). We won't be able to stop local "get out the vote" efforts, so we should encourage them instead and hope that as many projects as possible make an effort to go beyond the minimum.
Our project is international. It is not very suitable that such a discrepancy exists.
Agreed, though it's always important to look at the rates rather than the absolute numbers.
Third, last year, some rather heated discussions occured when results were not fully displayed. I would be pleased that this is set before the election, so that editors are not surprised when results are not published. Hence the questions : which results should be published ?
I'd say at least - number of votes per candidate - number of voters per wiki project / language.
Fourth, do you have overall some feedback to give on last year organisation, so that this year organisers can take them into account ?
I'd like the allowed length of the candidate statements to be clearly defined, and the length limit to be enforced. (I suggest 1000 characters of rendered text total.) Every candidate will of course be allowed to link to a detailed statement without a length limit. I'd also like the 1000 character statements to be fairly free-form, i.e. every candidate should be able to decide for themselves how to use that space.
All best,
Erik