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
