[Foundation-l] Re : on (re)organizing wikimedia

[Ray Saintonge]

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