[Foundation-l] Board elections: Weekly report for May 25 to June 04

[Jesse Plamondon-Willard]

Hello,

Following is a summary of the 2008 board elections for the week (and a
half) of May 25 to June 04. For detailed information on the elections,
see <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/en>.

==Timeline==
* Voting is open from June 01–21 at 23:59 (UTC).
* Email notification will be sent later this week (see "Email
notification" below).
* Eligible voters can ask questions to candidates on
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Candidates/Questions>.

==Rule change==
Incompletely-translated candidate pages will be published. These were
originally not allowed due to concerns about biasing voters for the
candidates whose presentations were readable in the voter's language,
but removed because a majority of the candidate pages were incomplete.

==Email notification==
The committee will send official email notification to eligible voters
later this week. Voters will receive notification in the language of
the project they are most active on (excluding multilingual projects
like Commons) and English (in case of error). If a translation is not
available, it will be sent in English. Users can opt out of the
notification on <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_nomail_list>
until a better way is developed.

==Technical problems==
Several technical issues were discovered and fixed before and in the
first days of voting.
* Users on many wikis were seeing the older 2006 and 2007 voting
interfaces. This was caused by locally-translated boardvote messages,
and was fixed by global deletion by Az1568, Cbrown1023, and
Pathoschild a few days before voting opened. A later recurrence of the
problem was fixed by deleting leftover boardvote messages on the
voting wiki.

* Users were unable to vote and given a error saying "Your Wikimedia
user ID could not be determined". This was caused by a communication
error between Wikimedia and the board election server, and was fixed
by Tim Starling a few hours after the elections started.

* The English interface was shown to all users, regardless of their
preferred language. This was caused by the boardvote wiki not setting
the language when it was received from Wikimedia. This was fixed by
Tim Starling a few hours after it was reported.

* Users from he-Wikipedia and nl-Wikipedia were unable to vote because
they blocked 127.0.0.1 (localhost), from which the script used to
determine eligibility was run. This caused the script to mark most
users from those wikis as indefinitely blocked, and thus ineligible.
The IP address was unblocked and the voter list manually corrected.

==Translation==
We currently have 42 translations. Due to the links in the boardvote
message delete reasons on many wikis (see "Technical problems" above),
the number of languages covered increased by 37.5%. If you'd like to
help, please see
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Translation>.

Translations by percentage completed (total size of complete pages /
total size of all pages):
* 100: ca, cs, de, el, en, es, fi, fr, id, it, ja, oc, pl, pt, ru, sr,
zh (hans, hant, yue);
* 30+: ar, be-x-old, eo, fa, ko, nb, nl, sv, uk;
* 10+: af, gl, he;
* 1+: hr, ro, eu, ksh;
* 0: hu, kk (arab, cyrl, latn), lb, ml, ms.

==See also==
* detailed information: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/en>
* ask a question: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Board_elections/2008>
* previous reports:
 - April 26 - May 3:
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/29567>
 - May 3-10: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/29783>
 - May 10-18: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/30134>
 - May 18-25: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/30323>

-- 
Yours cordially,
Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)