[Foundation-l] Board elections: Weekly report for April 26 to May 3

[Jesse Plamondon-Willard]

Following is a summary of the 2008 board elections organization for
 the week of April 26 to May 3. For detailed information on the
 elections, see <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/en>.

 ==Timeline==
 * We began accepting translations this week.
 * Candidates will be accepted starting next week on May 8.

 ==Election rules==
 On April 26 we unveiled the 2008 board elections pages and structure,
 timed to coincide with the committee and Board of Trustees
 announcements. We later added a warning not to edit the official
 English rules page (this was done in previous years as well).

 Based on community discussion, we changed the eligibility requirements
 for candidates and voters, so that they must have 50 edits between 01
 January and 01 June (instead of 01 April and 01 June). We also relaxed
 the requirements for candidates, so that they must have 600 edits
 before 01 January 2008 (instead of 01 June 2007).

 We discussed whether we needed to change the voter-requirements
 exceptions to cover remote staff (who don't work in the office), but
 decided this was unnecessary this year. The persons affected were
 eligible without exceptions, and a change would require a number of
 translation updates.

 Two discussions are currently on hold while we examine technical feasibility:
 * sending an official notification email to all eligible voters;
 * the voting system.

 ==Translation==
 We began accepting translations 5 days earlier than planned on April
 27, due to eager translators. The next day we added the navigation
 menu and removed the notification email (incomplete draft) as
 translatable pages.

 We currently have 28 translations. 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: de, en, fr, nb, pl, pt, ru, sv, zh-hans, zh-hant;
 * 80+: fa, ja, nl;
 * 20+: he;
 * 10+: ca, it;
 * 1+: eo, es, eu, fi, hr, ko, ml, uk;
 * 0: ar, cs, hu, id.

 ==Technical details==
 There have a flurry of tweaks and fixes following the original
 publication. These have simplified translations, reduced maintenance
 overhead, fixed an overlap display glitch on candidate pages, and
 added support for right-to-left languages.

 We expanded the translation page, so users can see at a glance:
 * the status of each translated page (missing/not complete/update needed/done);
 * the overall completion percentage of each language (based on page size);
 * the relative size in percentage of each page (so translators can
 start with the shorter pages).

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