Gerard Meijssen wrote: Yes! Well, I hope that others can do a better job than I can. :) Not at all. I meant that some of the candidates are entirely unacceptable _from the point of view of the active Wikimedia community_. No, I did not mean to imply that. She is very very famous in the English Wikipedia, but she is much more than that. I do not think it should count against her that she is an English Wikipedian. :) --Jimbo

James Hare wrote: Agreed, and precisely my point. Well said. :) --Jimbo

Hoi, I doubt that you have asked Angela or Daniel Meyer if they want to be a "life board member" of the Wikimedia Foundation. I think floating such an idea is irresponsible. Given that Angela decided that she no longer wants to be a board member should be respected. By pressing her to accept such a role it can also be considered a vote of no confidence on the people who are still on the board. Given that you are a candidate for exactly the position that Angela vacated, I think you have shot yourself in the foot. You are aware are you not that there will be this thing in Europe where the WMF considers how to look at it's future? I think that would be a much better platform to discuss issues like how to replace Tim. At this moment it is exclusively for Jimmy to replace him if he so chooses to do this. Given that there is to be this thing in Europe, you will be part of it when you are chosen to be there. The worst thing that can happen is if there is going to be a bout of infighting now that there is this opportunity to create some clarity and focus about the organisation and how it functions. Clarity is needed because of the secrecy and the lack of responsiveness needs to be replaced with a reasoned and reasonable openness combined with at least the minimal courtesy of an acknowledgment of receipt when it has been asked for. Focus is needed, because there are many opportunities for us. These opportunities will nor remain there indefinitely and we have a bad record on this. No is often a great answer, yes is often a great answer no answer is an open invitation to more confusion and more cross purpose activity. Focus is needed because there is a tendency to be overwhelmed by all the things that could be done. It is much better to be clear what the WMF is capable of and leave the rest to other associated organgisations. Focus is needed because it allows us to finish things so that we can move to new stuff. Clarity and focus will bring us less work because many of the issues we deal with are there because we have not positioned the WMF well and we have not made it clear what people are free to do within the WMF framework. Thanks, GerardM On 9/16/06, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Will there be some debate orginized between some candidates on irc? Would someone want to orginize that? (if it has not happened yet) Lodewijk 2006/9/16, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro(a)gmail.com>om>:

On 9/16/06, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia(a)alisonwheeler.com> wrote: Writing this now, just as I have heard of the passing of Rob Levin, I am very cognisant of the fleeting nature of time, and our passing through it, only to be judged finally by posterity, but even in our lifetimes, and in the context of the board of trustees, permanent is of course only permanent in the sense of not being up for periodical confirmation. I think the bylaws quite specifically make reference to the boards ability to dismiss members of itself by an internal board vote. So I think the larger point you make is moot. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, AKA. Cimon Avaro Candidate for Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation in the September 2006 elections.

On 9/16/06, Angela <beesley(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well, indeed I am not endorsing you for getting elected to the position you hold at the moment (that woud be ridiculous). But an appointment for a quite different role, the one that the current appointees have fulfilled quite nicely. Not necessarily being all that active at all times, but being a safeguard. This is a strong statement. And while I can understand how you might see it that way, your evaluation of the other candidates is perhaps clouded by the fact that you have not perhaps observed the other candidates as closely as you have Eric. Personally I reject the notion that there is any only one candidate or only one person who can act beneficiently in any one role. I think your insticts are right, but I don't think your judgement is accurate. I won't contradict any of what you say, but I think this election should not be about resolving conflicts internal to the board, but to work toward making sure that there wouldn't be internal conflicts within the board. I think it should be up to the electorate to decide if electing Erik would best ensure a lack of conflict. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, AKA. Cimon Avaro Candidate for Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation in the September 2006 elections.

On 9/16/06, Gregory Maxwell &lt;gmaxwell(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip> I completely disagree with this; I would much, much rather know *more* about the people I'm voting for, rather than less. I would also like to know that they are capable of writing well in at least one language, and that they have interesting ideas about the projects and are willing to take the time to express them. Remember: whoever is elected will be a very public representative of the projects and the Foundation in many situations, and thus that person needs to be articulate about them. So far Erik, and Aaron Swartz through his series of essays on Wikimedia (which are well worth reading), have done the best job of demonstrating this. I'd love to see the same from other candidates, though it's late in the game. No one is forcing anyone to read the candidate's statements... but since it's unlikely that anyone has had sustained personal interaction with all of the candidates, the statements are the only thing we have to go on in many cases. Effe's idea of a debate is also not terrible, though it is also late in the game: perhaps next election? -- phoebe -- phoebe ayers | user:brassratgirl | brassratgirl /at/ gmail.com

On 9/18/06, phoebe ayers &lt;phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I would like to point out, unless we cannot provide the good amont of translation resources (both material and human), responce to requests like Phoebe made, does only enlarge the hiatus between English and any other language, that is hiatus English competent voters and the editors whose English competence is not enough to skim up such a volumn of texts. And in the current situation, we rely on only unpaid volunteering translators, it is unfeasable to provide all information even in major lanauges on our projects (here "major languages" means "one of eight languages edits in that language is included into "80% of edits on the whole Wikipedia). I personally would like rather to provide equal amount of information to "every" language communities. I don't welcome nor that only English editors can access the information about the people they are voting for nor that there is enouous different of amount which voters can consider between editors having English competence and not. It would mean the elected one cannot represent the community as a whole, but not only a part of it, community of a certain language, in the worst case, I am afraid. And I think it is nor unwise nor kind for volunteering translators to expect to translate thousands of words text only in a week, or even in days. Translation is in general a task boring, painful and took many times. People who are not multilingual tend to think it is only to replace one word with an equivalent. No. It is a sort of reproduction and you need to understand the text in a whole, usually with its background. (That is why machine translation is only helpful to prepare a draft, not the completion in many cases). game: perhaps next election? In the same reason, in our current situation, I don't think it nice. It helps only English editors whoe are one third of our community, I am afraid. Even candidate presentation hasn't been completely translated. I prefer to see them finished to see candidate debates, so strongly objected to be involved into the latter; due to time limitation, I couldn't manage both at the same time and I thought support for the former belonged to the primary mission of Election Officials, but not the latter. As Election Officer, I feel I am of responsibility to the whole community, not only the communities I am active as editor, but literally all communities. Even in this last week of voting, I found some projects had been not noticed this Election from some reasons. It is my regret and currently one of biggest concerns of mine as Election Officials. I don't oppose candidate debate per se, but under our current condition I don't feel that is exactly what our best effort should go. -- Kizu Naoko Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org * vox populi, vox dei *

On 9/18/06, Kelly Martin &lt;kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: One of the best, and concise, posts of the year. -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On 9/17/06, Birgitte SB &lt;birgitte_sb(a)yahoo.com&gt; wrote: All of these are good questions. All of them can, and should, be answered, but not in the space of a single email message. That's a very disappointing statement. Why do you believe that? More importantly, what do you think needs to be changed so as to not make it beyond the capability of this organization? Kelly

Ok, first I will agree that Kelly's post was one of the best and most concise of this year. But then let me also applaud Delphine's followup, particularly this bit here: Delphine Ménard wrote: One of the most worrying trends I have seen is a tendency for people to think of "the Foundation" as being completely apart from "the Community". That way lies madness, I think. --Jimbo

Here, here. Notwithstanding Dear Leader's statement ( ;-), Jimbo) , the words might not be perfect, but I think Delphine's sentiment here is exactly right. From my perspective, what happens in the office to keep the servers running, bills paid, and all of the rest of the stuff that never touches the online space (much less in other languages and projects) could not be more separate than the day-to-day goings on of the projects. I grasp how utterly challenging it is to reach across the divide, really. How we do so is going to be the great challenge of the next chapter of WMF's existence. If I understand what I think Jimbo meant, he meant that the reins of the organization were NOT going to be tossed over to venture capitalists who would treat it as a private company, that the people WMF turns to for assistance will come from both inside and outside the community, and that the community must always be respected as the source of everything we do. Making the connection to people in lands very distant from those of us here in the office (see Anthere's marvelous discussion about her Abuja experience) mean there is much work to be done by WMF both for those who love WMF projects (and already self-identify as "involved") and those who have never heard of us before. Governance, however, is still a Real World Issue. I think as this dynamic, international system matures, WMF will continue to do what it must to secure itself so the projects can continue to exist in the Real World, and evolve to support the language-of-origin and project-of-origin affinities users and editors develop. I continue to remain deliriously optimistic that these are great challenges to have. "What seems to be the trouble?" "We have so many projects and so many volunteers in so many languages we are having a hard time keeping up." WMF just has to do more. -Brad Delphine Ménard wrote:

I am afraid I don't get what you mean here. Delphine (English as a second language. ;-) ) -- ~notafish

On 9/18/06, Brad Patrick &lt;bradp.wmf(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Thank you, much clearer. Yep, completely. Delphine -- ~notafish

--- Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: I applaud all the people that devote so much time to working at the Foundation level. But there is a large problem that I believe keeps more people from becoming a part of this. For some reason people at this level just cannot just work together for the greater good without political maneuvering. Someone *must* be called out for past misdeeds. So and so simply *cannot* work together. Foo must be mentioned to try and embarass X. I am nearly certain proposals are run through back chat rooms before being made public. I begin to wonder sometimes if certain groups have actually developed "talking points" on some issues. Far too many disscussions on this list are approached with a noticable lack of sincerity from several parties. Most issues are just another battle-ground in larger power-struggle. If I haven't been clear on this already. Infighting is really harming this organization. Cut it out! Everyone! Stop gossiping Socialize in public channels Assume Good Faith Work together on the issues where you can actually agree with your normal opposition. There really must be sometime you agree on. I mean you all like Wikimedia, right? If you know you can never agree with someone on a certain issue; Aviod them there. Respond to the comments made by third parties only. If someone is trying to avoid fighting with you; don't provoke them. Before you hit send read your comments. If anything is a sly allusion to some historical confrontation, take that part out. Did I mention not proking people. Please don't provoke people. Everyone has a few hot buttons. Avoid pushing them. This whole idea about wiki's being open to everyone? Please realize that includes the people you cannot stand. So bite your tongue and work with them. You need not have children together! Everyday people go work and manage to deal with co-workers, customers, or officials they cannot stand. It is possible for it to be done here as well. As long as working at the Foundation level involves picking sides and which chat rooms you are invited too, it will not be something everyone can be a part of. I am now done abstractly bitching for the day. Birgitte SB __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

On Mon, Sep 18, 2006 at 12:14:14PM -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote: Heh, that's actually pretty much the best-to-hope-for ideal as far as service management organisations go. If the foundation can act in the background and ensure the wikis keep working, I'd say that that's a fairly important task in itself. As usual for such a role, people only notice when things go wrong. Not a word of praise, but when things break down, it's moan moan moan ;-) [1] So I'd say that if that's how people view the foundation mostly, - well sure that's not exactly great - but at least it's a good sign. read you soon, Kim Bruning [1] And hey, paradoxally, at least it stimulates people to donate more money for our servers. -- [Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment] gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key FEF9DD72 5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A 01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72

--- Kelly Martin &lt;kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Looking at the sheer number of delegate elections that would be necessary, and taking into account the current lack of communication between individual communities and the Foundation, I cannot see how WMF is capable of ensuring fair elections. And certainly the possiblity of corruption exists to some degree. These proposed elections would give that possibily a some hundred oppourtunies to pop up. Also the current election appears to be quite a strain on election offcials. I cannot imagine how that situation would scale. If you propose to letting individual communities handle these elections internally, I wonder why you do not trust the same people who would be in charge of elections to have Checkuser abilities? If the eletions are to be run by WMF officials then they will need the budget to hire professional translators for all the languages they are expected to oversee. I don't mean to imply this will always be beyond our capability, but I certainly think it is in the near future. Then there is the greater question of will having delegations actually solve anything? There needs to be actual communication between the various communities and WMF before we can talk about electing delegates. I think that there is little understanding out there of what WMF actually is and where the line between WMF and the communities is drawn. What is needed first and foremost is outreach from WMF to the communities. Any current communication mostly happens in the in the opposite direction. When the communities reach a stalemate or a minority opinion is held by people with strong convictions then they come to this list. Where various people give their various opinions on the subject and then promptly ignore the problem. I mean what are the odds that the Russian WP will atually be given a road-map much less a solution for the Verifiabilty problem? They will get the same non-answer that Wikibooks got over the ethics question. And the trademarks question. And then when some intiative is put forward by WMF everyone wonders why there is little feedback from the communities. We have all the shiny communications tools of the 21st century at our fingertips. Yet there is such support for using the centuries old delegate soultion for our *communication problem.* I really do not understand this. I am not going to conclude that there is not any form of delegation that could possibily benefit WMF in the future. However there needs to be strong communication between the WMF and various communities before we can talk of how to develop a system of delegation. This has been nothing I haven't said before so I am sure everyone is either bored or depressed at this point so here are new ideas. Arrange a weekly moderated IRC chat panel with people knowledgable about WMF. Focus on what WMF is and what it can and can't do for the communities. Each week questions will be taken in a different language which has no coresponding national chapter. No questions in English allowed. Poll the actual communities in there own languages about what they would like to see from WMF (I can guarantee it isn't infighting!) Here is a big one. Read the archive of the mailing list and *follow up* with past problems. Find out what happened and what help is still needed if any. Ask the existing national chapters to find a language community with immigration in their nation and put together a "Big brother" program to better intergrate that community into Foundation and chapter issues. I think the idea that the majority of votes coming from en.WP is a language issue is incorrect. If we were getting requests for translations that we could not process I would think it was a language issue. I believe this is the same problem that has been going on since I first started reading this list. Most communities expectations of WMF are *very* different from the role the WMF has given itself. When people don't see the Foundation helping them find solutions. And they do become aware of the continous power struggles. Then they lose interest and just decide to do the best within their own familiar community so long as the Foundation doesn't come bother them there. And generally the Foundation doesn't. This is why I believe many people are not bothering to vote. Because they don't believe that the Foundation affects thier community and what they know about the workings of the Foundation turns them off. Birgitte SB __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

On 9/18/06, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Any figures, facts etc. to support this assumption? Delphine (curious) -- ~notafish

On 18/09/06, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I get press enquiries from non-English-speaking countries asking about "Wikipedia" and clearly meaning only en:wp. I often have to go to some effort to find a local editor to talk to them about their local Wikipedia. (It seems they usually use en: because it's much bigger and hence more useful to readers.) It may not be ideal that it's the biggest in mindshare and income as well as edits, but pretending that it isn't doesn't make it so. - d.

On 9/18/06, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: May I ask you in which languages these articles are? Probably not in the same language I usually read. Let's put the donation notice on all projects and see what happens. -- Arne

On 9/19/06, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yes, but only if you visit Google News in another language. I don't believe there's a way to get news on a topic in all languages from Google. For example, you need to visit http://news.google.com/news?ned=de to see news in German (or perhaps in Germany. They seem to mix up language and country. http://news.google.com/news?ned=pt-BR_br http://news.google.com/news?ned=pt-PT_pt generally give the same alerts.) Angela.

geni wrote: That calls for numbers. Arne, are you able to tell us how much does the German Verein makes on donations as of today ? Roughly ? Anthere

On 9/18/06, Luiz Augusto &lt;lugusto(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Taking that approach on en will get you de-admined. -- geni

geni wrote: ... and as you're so famously good at doing, you haven't pointed out *why*. The English Wikipedia is both the biggest and the oldest, and it's always the one which dies under heavy load. In some ways it's because of en: that continual fundraising is needed - mainly for hardware - and the thought of *not* having the donations notice in there is, well, unthinkable. Even the outage page has a link to the donations site. However, I fully understand why people on other project wouldn't want to see the donations notice all the time; but this is a difference of culture and something we have to live with. -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

On 9/18/06, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The language barrier tends to result in the foundation being less involved on other projects. Can you imagine what would happen if en had the same issues with the verifiability policy as ru? the odds are we would be being asked some pretty tough question by the foundation. How many other projects have an equivalent to [[en:Wikipedia:Office Actions]]? Again the foundation is unlikely to allow this. In practice you should hope the en does not focus on exclusively looking after it self (although for a number of reasons that would be pretty much impossible for this to happen) and considers itself as part of a greater project. OK lets look at some international figures: en dominates the alexa results: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=wikipedia.org&url=w… other than a brief appearance by de en dominates the search results: http://www.google.com/trends?q=en.wikipedia.org%2C+es.wikipedia.org%2C+de.w… Combined I think they already are in terms of number of articles. Individually nothing is going to challenge en any time soon. I tend towards the "vote for anyone I consider competent" approach. -- geni

On 9/18/06, Anthere &lt;Anthere9(a)yahoo.com&gt; wrote: Well put. Kelly

geni wrote: That's one hell of an unreliable source. -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

On 9/19/06, Delphine Ménard &lt;notafishz(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: It appears to happen. Different but largely useless unless you can find out how many search requests come from various areas. You also have the problem that you have no way of knowing which language people are looking at. -- geni

On 9/19/06, Delphine Ménard &lt;notafishz(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Look at how they are normalized. -- geni

On 18/09/06, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Would this sort of thinking be why it's almost impossible for someone from en: to become a steward these days? - d.

David Gerard wrote: Do you have facts and names to assert that claim David ? Ant

David Gerard wrote: ... but someone else would have asked. Please don't blame Anthere for not remembering some email she may or may not have had time to read; she's a very busy person. -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

David Gerard wrote: I still disagree. Let me ask it differently. How not being a majority of a group right now makes it almost impossible for someone to join a group ? Are they rules to prevent that from happening ? Is there a policy to create this so-called discrimination ? Anthere

habj wrote: Very good point. Ant

On 9/18/06, Kelly Martin &lt;kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Indirect elections is a terrible idea. Indirect elections are used in a certain North-American country. It is an election type that allows a war-mongering cowboy who stands for less gun control, less social welfare programs, and who doesn't give a rat's ass about the enviroment ("there is no such thing as a human-created enviroment changes" my ass) to become the President even though he gets fewer votes than the other candidate. This should have taught people a lesson about indirect elections. Besides allowing for minority vote candidates to be elected, this system would not work in Wikimedia because you would first need to have elections on who should be electors from each language/project/etc. It would become a bureaucratic mess. (PS! The above is just meant as an example on how an indirect election can go (very) wrong, and not meant to start a political discussion; if you have very strong feelings on the issue, don't reply to it here, but rather on my private mail, if at all.) -- Best regards, Jon Harald Søby Website - http://www.alqualonde.com/ Wikipedia - http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruker:Jhs MSN messenger - jhsoby(a)gmail.com Skype - jon.harald.soby

On 9/19/06, Gregory Maxwell &lt;gmaxwell(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I don't want to take this on this list, because of its off-topic nature (and was stupid to get caught up in the moment and post it in the first place); I'll reply to you in private later. =) Anyways, my point was that indirect elections _might_ turn out to have inaccurate results (though that is a rather rare situation), and that it would be especially hard to arrange this on Wikimedia projects. -- Best regards, Jon Harald Søby Website - http://www.alqualonde.com/ Wikipedia - http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruker:Jhs MSN messenger - jhsoby(a)gmail.com Skype - jon.harald.soby

On 9/19/06, Kelly Martin &lt;kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: {{citation needed}} (...) Let's also not forget that direct democracy elected Hitler, and yet we [[Godwin's Law]] ?

Gregory Maxwell wrote: I don't think anybody needs to read everything by or about all the candidates. For most of us there are some easy yesses and some easy nos; it's only the uncertain ones that we need to examine more closely. Ec

On 9/19/06, Aphaia &lt;aphaia(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Due to the use og global notice the only way that can happen is if there is already something in sitenotice. -- geni

As I wrote as responce to Birgitte in another time in this thread, On 9/21/06, phoebe ayers &lt;phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: So I think. and that I object (except "no guarantee" part). As I stated before, it means "if you can read language A, you are provided more materials than language non-A speakers". On local projects, I found some signs some people thought such additional materials would be just a sign of those candidates are anglo-centric. Since the Election is not yet closed, I stop my wording here at this moment. But frustration of non-English communities will follow a conclusion which may be a nightmare for English people, I predict, and perhaps for other language speaking people too. Considering such reactions and frustrations on non-English speaking communities, regarding equal-oppotunity of electrates, I strongly oppose this idea. -- Kizu Naoko Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org * vox populi, vox dei *

Hi Aphaia, I think you make a good point, At the other hand, I have to say that I can get pretty frustrated too when someone refuses to say something in English, although (s)he is capable to do so. I think at the moment we cannot avoid English being the major communication language, the center of translations. It is quite logical that when something should be translated or communicated as broad as possible, it should first be translated into English, and then people can start translating from english to other languages. (I do not intent to critizize your attempts, I think they are good, I'm just still a little frustrated because of a candidate who means hopefully all well, but just refuses to give a clear answer in English... :s) Greetz, Lodewijk 2006/9/21, Aphaia &lt;aphaia(a)gmail.com&gt;om>:

yesterday a friend of mine gave me this (script-generated) counting of votes cast over the languages in the various projects so far: (this is no final result, one can count this oneself from [[Special:Boardvote/list]]) english - 1003 german - 320 french - 124 dutch - 101 spanish - 89 finnish - 52 italian - 48 japanese - 38 portuguese - 37 norwegian - 30 turkish - 28 commonswiki - 26 (rest less than 25) for example, the few amount of voters on ja: is striking, in view of the size of the project. in general, the 4 biggest voting languages are all west-european (over a hundred votes each). i think can we draw from this the conclusion that various projects are concerned with "international affairs" rather differently each in its own way, the size of a language project or community not being a yardstick for its international engagement and involvement. it also means that just having access to the english voters is quite enough to win, they are by far the largest contingent. it is my conviction that for the future, more than "just" translations for elections (i take them as an example of a bigger thing to consider here) are mandatory to evercome this *gap in culture*. (a point of attention for the board retreat imho) oscar On 9/20/06, phoebe ayers &lt;phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Angela wrote: For reference for the (relatively) new comers Here is a graph for participation in 2004: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Election_participation2.png Note, there was a chinese candidate): 11 votes Same in 2005 : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_results_2005/statistics Note, there were 89 votes from french speaking project in 2004 (compare to figures this year. The community increased greatly in two years, but votes are hardly more numerous. Hmmm, well, actually, I believe most french editors do not know the french candidate :-) fr: ~89 (2004) - 106 (2005) - 124 (2006) en: ~238 (2004) - 726 (2005) - 1003 (2006) ja: ~18 (2004) - 19 (2005) - 38 (2006) Japanese lack of participation was also noted last year and we got some explanation from Aphaia. Apparently, it is not only lack of knowledge of candidate, lack of ja candidate, but also a cultural issue. Kuddos for the turkish !!! ant

Ehm, Dutch: two candidates :P (although kim is mostly active on en:, he is Dutch) 2006/9/21, Angela &lt;beesley(a)gmail.com&gt;om>:

On Thu, Sep 21, 2006 at 04:43:06PM +0100, David Gerard wrote: Eia is trying to claim me :-P -- [Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment] gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key FEF9DD72 5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A 01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72

Angela wrote: No Native American voters are represented. Very sad. Jeff

Jeff Merkey wasn't eligible to vote, since he got indefinitely blocked from a wiki. On 9/23/06, Austin Hair &lt;adhair(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On 9/21/06, Andrew Lih &lt;andrew.lih(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I think the fundamental issues we are dealing with are quite simply culture and language barriers. Electing electors, creating councils or forming multilingual committees does not help us to cross those barriers. We're only going to end up encountering the same barriers on a smaller scale: in the Board, in a council, in the committees. We are trying to build one of the most multilingual, multicultural organizations on the planet, one which is driven and enabled by modern communications technology. Yet, the technology we're using right now -- an e-mail list -- is quite outdated. Indeed, this very message does not even carry the most basic information what language it is written in. There's no way for any translator to easily attach (in a machine-readable way) a version in another language. Filtering by language is non-trivial. There's no method to assign priorities for translation, and to manage these tasks. The Wikimedia Foundation does not employ any language or culture experts, or translators. As a consequence, the possibilities for a non-English speaking Japanese Wikipedian who wants to be involved in Foundation matters, or to even just follow what's happening, are very limited. There may also be cultural barriers -- some cultures may be reluctant to use e-mail addresses for communications. I'm not aware of any forum system which handles multiple content languages well. Indeed, building such a system may be a great service not just to our community, but to organizations in very similar situations. With the technology in place, we can build sensible policy around it, and enable people to participate who couldn't before. David McCabe has made great progress on implementing LiquidThreads, a new forum system for MediaWiki. With some funding and management, it could lead us in that direction. If we can enable multilingual and multicultural participation on a _large_ scale, it will be relatively easy, I think, to transfer that model to smaller scales if we deem it necessary. The opposite is not true. As for the Board, so far no candidate has ever been elected who does not respect the multilinguality of our community. In fact, the two community-elected members, Angela and Anthere, are both outspoken supporters thereof. Yes, they both speak English, one of them natively. However, nobody can deny that speaking English is a useful skill. Trying to make the Board literally representative of all languages or cultures is trying the impossible. However, making the ability to speak English no longer a requirement to participate in Foundation matters, _is_ possible. And perhaps, as part of that process, it will even become possible for a person who does not speak English to be elected to the Board. -- Peace & Love, Erik

On 9/21/06, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Non-english users need to have access for at least read decisions made by that "US-based nonprofit". This is very simple.

On 9/21/06, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: My inbox was hidded the previous quoted text and I didn't observed it (feature running as bug...). Sorry.

On 9/21/06, Anthony &lt;wikilegal(a)inbox.org&gt; wrote: on my meta talk page i [ http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AOscar&diff=4379… some of these questions today]. in this regard i like to especially point out the passage at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Oscar#answers , from which i quote "*special attention to the communication, starting through key persons, especially with all non-english projects and languages, thus starting a process of bridging worldwide cultural differences (if we don't succeed in this who will???). creation of a council-level, intermediate between board and projects."** *i believe this is just the beginning of a process of analysis, and developing of strategies, together, to overcome this. a solution must grow gradually, and cannot be one person's "magical idea" imho: it needs close collaboration, worldwide. many more comparative statistics may be mandatory. personally i am reading up on the subject as well. ** oscar* *

Anthony wrote: The Debian project organizes itself largely around direct elections, and has a pretty international base of voters. They do only let official Debian developers vote, though, which is maybe more like if we only let admins vote in our elections. They do seem to be moderately successful at it. I don't recall much controversy about the nationalities of project leaders---disputes about the direction of the project and technical issues play a much bigger role in voting than whether someone comes from the same country as you. -Mark

oscar wrote: I think this argues for some form of indirect democracy in order to broaden the international participation in the foundation. Conspicuously missing, as Oscar wrote, is Japanese, but also Polish. --Jimbo

Jimmy Wales wrote: ... we forgot Poland? -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

"... we forgot Poland?" Fucking priceless. On 9/24/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) &lt;alphasigmax(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

geni wrote: I don't think anyone would disagree with that, of course. The question is, how to make sure that people in smaller language projects have a proper voice. It is not trivial to do this in a sensible way. The current situation is not horrible in this regard, because it does not matter where someone *comes from* per se, so long as they take a global approach. --Jimbo

geni wrote: I do agree that mass meetings would probably not work for similar reasons. There is also a presumtion that we would need to have already recognized just who those community representatives would be. Not everybody is involved with commons. A person who almost exclusively deals with text has no reason to go there. This would be a needless restriction. The most likely non-text media for people on a minor language project, are going to photos and music related to their own culture in their own language. They need to be able to find their own rules about these, without needing to make sense of commons legalese which may not yet be translated into their own language. I would not interpret "global approach" to mean global solutions. A more important factor for it would be global respect. Ec

Hoi, In most wiktionaries pictures are used to illustrate concepts. In most wiktionaries references to Wikipedia exist for those who want to know more about a concept. WiktionaryZ will not differ from this as well. We do want pictures and we will point to Wikipedia when people want more information. Given that pictures illustrate one or more concepts, and given that concepts have words in many languages, it is possible to use references to WiktionaryZ in commons thereby enabling the search of pictures in many languages. Yes, I know it is an old idea, but we are now technically advanced to the point where the implementation of this can be considered. Commons and WiktionaryZ can mutually benefit from each others content. Thanks, GerardM http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Using_Ultimate_Wiktionary_for_Commons On 9/25/06, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Birgitte SB wrote: These are all possibilities, but I don't see how a poll would be a useful metric. With over 700 projects it is easy to see that the small number of people regularly involved in them may just feel that what they say or think doesn't matter. It is also impossible for each of those projects to be directly represented on the Board. While I agree that the Board should be bigger there are still limits beyond which it would become unworkable or just as dysfunctional as a Board that's too small. I don't know what the optimum number should be. I think that the autonomy of each project and each chapter should be paramount. Any limitations to that autonomy should be clear and unambiguous. The application of the four general pillars as principles would certainly be a fair limitation, as would "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia" to all Wikipedias. It also makes sense that WMF would have some control over its logos. Between the Board and the individual projects we need new but complex structures that have no model to go by. Councils that bring together Wikimedians by language, by type of project or by nationality are all possibilites but even there the autonomy of the smaller units needs to be recognized. A technical advance may seem the best thing imaginable on a big Wikipedia, but a smaller Wikipedia may not be ready for it. It may be discussed and approved by a Council of Wikipedias, but would essentially still need to be ratified by each one before it is applicable there. The legal responsibilities of the Board need to be recognized, but those responsibilities should never be more than they need to be. Having members who act illegally on their own initiative is inevitable. If we consider the WMF to be a service provider it should not be required to act as a baby sitter. The circumstances when it would act to block an illegal act must be clearly defined. Experience can easily show us that random allegations by uninvolved third parties tend to give very uncertain expressions of what is legal. We do need some clear understanding of the point at which the WMF becomes responsible for certain kinds of action. We need to always keep in mind that there is no organization like Wikimedia, and to avoid preconceptions about what its structure will ultimately become. Every step of the way needs careful consideration. Ec

Jimmy Wales wrote: The trouble I had with geni's comment is that I couldn't determine whether he meant it descriptively or prescriptively. As a desciptive comment it makes perfectly good sense, and I can't argue against it. As a prescriptive comment it opens up avenues for the tyranny of the majority, and I would be concerned about the absence of checks and balances to safeguard minority rights. Absolutely, especially when the size disparities are so great. This is why I would start from the prionciple of project autonomy. In international affairs being a nation-state is worth something, even for the tiniest of Caribbean and South Pacific Islands. That's under control for now, but there is a strong risk that this could change in the future. Ec

On 24/09/06, Alison Wheeler &lt;wikimedia(a)alisonwheeler.com&gt; wrote: And that it's hard enough to get across to people from non-English-speaking countries that there are Wikipedias other than the English one. I do what I can when this comes up, but they keep assuming it ... - d.

Gregory Maxwell wrote: I have proposed such resolution to the board before wikimania. It has not been approved. Anthere

On 9/20/06, oscar &lt;oscar.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: and as such, i have no possible personal conflict of interest whatsoever with wikimedia, just a violent love and dedication for its mission and principles. oscar

On 9/20/06, Kim Bruning &lt;kim(a)bruning.xs4all.nl&gt; wrote: .. That's certainly true. I did not mean to explicitly _disendorse_ Oscar, merely to explain why I did not add him to my list of "alternative vote endorsements", in response to Jimmy's comments. But as I've already said, I think this sort of public mailing list exchange of comments about the candidates is probably more harmful than helpful, and in retrospect, I should not have contributed to it. -- Peace & Love, Erik

On 9/20/06, Kim Bruning &lt;kim(a)bruning.xs4all.nl&gt; wrote: with aproval voteing it's only disendorsements that matter. -- geni