Okay, this is a first part of the short report of the 2005 elections to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees.
First of all, the most important for us, the translation. The election notice has been translated to 28 languages, the majority of Wikimedia users are probably aware of the election.
As for the candidates, it's not so good, but the major Wikimedia languages are covered. The candidate statements are available in 14 different languages (actually, the translation to Zh and Ca of Jussi-Ville Heiskanen is still needed), so that shouldn't be a problem.
Now, we had one minor problem - it turned out we had to change the requirements to vote from at least 400 edits on every project, to at least 400 edits on ONE project. We weren't too happy about making a change, but we all accepted it - it had to be done due to technical issues.
Tim Starling has put the Election UI up for translation today, we hope it'll get translated on major Wikipedias if not today, tomorrow or the day after, when the local sysops will notice that a part of the page is left in English.
Back to the technical issues - we aren't sure yet how the 1.5 migration will effect the election. Tim said everything will go okay, but it has to be noted that the migration might not be finished until midnight UTC time. If that will be the case, the elections will be delayed for a few hours. It's nothing big to worry about, though.
And, finally, we have 5 candidates. Angela with Anthere are standing for re-election, Arno Lagrange and Cimon avaro are running in the elections again, and Francis Schonken is standing for the first time.
On behalf of the Election Officials, I wish everyone good luck!
Everything is now ready technically, I'm just waiting for the word to switch it on. I've also organised UI text translations for the larger wikis. Apologies for the lateness and the lack of communication on my part, I lost my Internet access for most of the local evening, which was the lead-up to the deadline, and I had an important meeting the next morning. Conversion problems probably would have delayed the start anyway.
If I'm not around when the election administrators would like to start the vote, ask a dev to start it by uncommenting the code in php-1.5/BoardVoteInit.php .
I have the tally key this year. I'll distribute copies to the admins as soon as they're ready.
-- Tim Starling
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org