[Foundation-l] Notice of the results of the WMF Board of Trustees election

[Andrew Gray]

On 15/07/07, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/14/07, Dedalus <dedalus at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> >
> > My impression is that voter turn out in countries with a local chapter
> >  of the Wikimedia Foundation are highest ranking. Correct me if I'm
> >  wrong.
>
> There's no way to tell whether you're right or wrong, because there is
> no information available as to which countries voters came from, only
> from which project they voted. The only way to test the accuracy of
> your impression would be to make the assumption that all editors of a
> given language edition come from a particular country, which would be
> foolish.

There's no *solid* information, but using edit count as a proxy for
community location we can get a rough idea.

93% of all edits to jawiki came from Japan
86% of all edits to itwiki came from Italy
80% of all edits to plwiki came from Poland

dewiki, nlwiki, svwiki, fiwiki, hewiki all were in the 70-79% band of
edits from "their" countries. (All these figures *may* be
undercounting by a few %)

So, yeah, there's a definite correlation. One Western country speaks
the language, and it's not a first language elsewhere? You're seeing a
strong link between "nationals" and "editors".

And this covers our two highest-turnout projects; Italian and Polish.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk