Birgitte SB wrote:
I certainly don't want to see an advisory group of 50% en.WP editors! However such token represntation as proposed in the Wikicouncil plan would be of little practical benifit. It would be better to appoint (or nominate a short list for election) an advisory board with an purposeful effort to include editors from both all types of sister projects and communities of different sizes while keeping the number of people within reason. Another option is to encourage different projects to each form their own sort of council and each can endorse ideas or write proposals with the unique goals of each project in mind. Those are just two rough ideas, there are certainly many other alternatives.
I believe it is most important that the input of small languages and non-pedia projects is taken into conderation in any such advisory council. Not that every editor is given proportional representation. The latter would either be too much dominated by en.WP or else too large to offer useful and timely advice. Honestly the concerns of en.WP are being heard every day and would still be heard if they had not a single seat on such a council (I am not suggesting that!). The real need for such a council is to find out the needs/opinions of the smaller projects/lang. communities which are not currently being heard.
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.
A governing Board somewhat larger than the present Board would have the reponsibility of safeguarding assets and core policy, as well as fulfilling legal responsibilities. It should not be dominated by any one nation. A majority should be elected (directly or indirectly) by the community, but the community should not have 75% of the positions on the Board. The remainder of the Board could be appointed in some suitable way. A full 75% of the Board members would still be required to change core values.
An advisory Board could be of indefinite size, completely appointed, and composed of eminent persons from within and without the community. Its function would be simply to advise, and it would have no decision making powers.
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.
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.
Ec