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

[Ray Saintonge]

geni wrote:

>On 9/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>The question is, how to make sure that people in smaller language
>>projects have a proper voice.  It is not trivial to do this in a
>>sensible way.
>>    
>>
>Well there are various ways you could do it through mass meetings of
>community repersentives or trying to start an organisation of small
>wikis but those have high overhead.
>
I do agree that mass meetings would probably not work for similar 
reasons.  There is also a presumtion that we would need to have already 
recognized just who those community representatives would be.

>I would suggest pushing commons. There people will work together
>because there is something in it for them and working together is
>likely to produce far stronger links than any meeting or elections.
>
Not everybody is involved with commons.  A person who almost exclusively 
deals with text has no reason to go there.

>I have already suggested that projects below a certain size be limited
>to taking images from commons only (although mostly for copyright
>reasons). Push commons in the right direction and you could end up
>with a truly cosmopolitan community
>
This would be a needless restriction.  The most likely non-text media 
for people on a minor language project, are going to photos and music 
related to their own culture in their own language.  They need to be 
able to find their own rules about these, without needing to make sense 
of commons legalese which may not yet be translated into their own 
language. 

>>The current situation is not horrible in this regard, because it does
>>not matter where someone *comes from* per se, so long as they take a
>>global approach.
>>    
>>
>Again I belive this could be solved by have commons work in such a way
>to create a pool of such candidates.
>
I would not interpret "global approach" to mean global solutions.  A 
more important factor for it would be global respect.

Ec