Arun,

While all the noteworthy Wikimedians announced and jury mentions are good, I am very disappointed that some of the very outstanding nominations are left out for unknown reasons. There is no need to limit the number of selections if documentation, learning is the motive. I resisted nominating anyone to save this disappointment for myself and the nominated Wikipedians.

First of all, having a jury sounds un-wikipediac for me. This is a kind of hierarchy which is common in award committees but does not belong in Wikipedia. In Wikipedia, we have a jury only in extreme cases for arbitration. In cases where we can have more than one able choice, we have only the community to nominate and recognize all able nominations (Example: sysop elections ). And, when the community is small, many times we assume good faith without voting and revert only if a difference of opinion arises ( Example: Featured Wikipedians in Tamil Wikipedia).

In our earlier conversation analogies were drawn to Nobel prize and Jimmy's Global Wikimedian of the year. Jimmy's award is purely personal choice and there can be no controversy for that (Please clarify if that is an official award by WMF). A comparison with Nobel prize doesn't sound good as this is an exercise done by Wikipedians for the Wikipedians.

And the whole planning of this year's NWR left much to be desired.

If you want to continue doing this every year, please do it without jury and ask each community to send their choices and recognize all of them.

Ravi



On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Arun Ramarathnam <arunram25@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Wikimedians,

On behalf of the jury for the NWR 2011,  thank you all for you active participation and your nominations of contributing Wikimedians for the recognition.

We shared the details during Day 3 of the WikiConference India. The updated deck is shared for your reference,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/NWR_2011_and_Jury_mention_V1.0.pdf

Let us applaud all the 41 nominations. They are fantastic contributors and a great inspiration. We salute their passion and commitment to contribute and develop educational content under a free license.  We should celebrate everyone of them. 

I would like to thank the entire Jury  personally for their time and efforts toward the NWR 2011 exercise.

This is the first year for the NWR 2011 and we have tried our best to make this exercise participative. Next year we hope to do even better. We welcome everyone's inputs to make this even process better next year.  
 
The intention of this exercise was to Discover, Document, Recognize and Share the contributions of prolific Wikimedians. As you will appreciate this is an ongoing process. We hope we taken a small step in that direction.

Thank you.

regards
Arun
On behalf the NWR 2011 Jury