[Foundation-l] Volunteer Council - A shot for a resolution

[Delirium]

Milos Rancic wrote:
> Usefulness of such huge body is related, also, to a positive [discrimination] of
> smaller projects (actually, all except English and German
> Wikipedias!), as well as helping to really small projects to be
> represented. So, instead of having electoral which would be something
> like 50% en.wp, 12% de.wp, 5% fr.wp, 5% es.wp, 3% fr.wp and 25% the
> rest of the world, including, for example, Chinese and Hindu
> Wikipedias and Commons represented with 0.01% -- we would get
> electoral body where we would be able to hear voices of all projects.
>   

I don't think an electoral approach would turn out like that, though, 
because many Wikimedians actually agree that representation should be 
distributed, and so Wikimedia-related elections generally haven't broken 
down on linguistic lines (a good thing!). Of the five board members ever 
elected in community elections, for example, two are English native 
speakers, one French, one Dutch, and one Italian. If voting were along 
national or linguistic lines, no Dutch or Italian native speaker, and 
probably not even any French native speaker, would ever have been elected.

I'm not saying elections are always the best choice, but unless things 
actually do start to turn out badly, I don't think it makes sense to 
assume that anything done by vote among Wikimedia projects will result 
in the worst case of sectarianism. Most of us base our vote *much* more 
on how much we agree with each candidate on the future of the 
organization than we do on whether we happen to come from the same country.

-Mark