[Foundation-l] Restricting Appointed members (Proposal).

[Lars Aronsson]

Milos Rancic wrote:

> However, we are voting for Board's members, even Wikimedia is 
> not member-based organization.

I think the board does a great job.  I have not bothered to 
comment on (or participate in) these elections, because I would be 
perfectly happy if Jimbo personally appointed new members.  There 
are so few positions to fill, that I think it is futile to try to 
make them representative of anything else than their own good 
judgement.  I think it would be a loss if members of the board or 
the proposed volunteer council would start to "represent" their 
part of the community (against other parts) instead of trying to 
do what's best for all.  And I don't want to be represented.

The requirement for voting in these board elections has been at 
least 400 edits in a single project over at least 90 days. The 
number of voters have increased from 1484 (2005) to 4170 (2007). 
But I find no information on meta how many voters were eligible. 
The English Wikipedia alone now has more than 6 million user 
accounts, but how many of these have more than 400 edits?

Is 400+ edits going to be the definition of "community" membership 
with the proposed volunteer council too?  I think we need to know 
how large this community is and exactly who is included, even if 
we don't call this a formal membership. Eligible community size 
could be new column in [[m:List of Wikipedias]], etc.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se