[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

[oscar]

On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> oscar wrote:
> > 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)
>
> 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


i agree!

we would probably need to move towards some kind of a two-round election
procedure.
i feel however, that more figures and analysis is needed before any feasible
system can be proposed which improves this.
what we want to strive for in he future is ''fair representation'', rather
than ''absolute majority'' imho.
some questions about figures:
1. what are the final statistics on the votes:
1.1 per language
1.2 per project
1.3 per language per project and vice versa
2.1 per country (analysis of location of ip's)
2.2 open proxies voted
3. per date/time of voting (progressive statistics)
4. comparison with number of ballots to number of active wikians, as a
whole, per language and per project
etc etc etc

some related observatons:
after i published the voting results in the dutch village pump last night,
some rather active contributor congratulated me, asking me if 3rd place also
meant if i was elected or no.
from this the conclusion can be drawn that the board, these elections, and
the metawiki, are something very very far away and only remotely familiar
(if at all) to most of the ''local editors'', a gap which we must be able to
breach in the near future, at least with regard to informing the respective
communities in their local languages, beyond merely announcing and
explaining things on the metawiki.
the email-lists are inappropriate for people new to this imho (it took me
quite some time to get familiar with them too).

oscar