[Foundation-l] Pointing out to an oddity

[Birgitte SB]

--- On Wed, 5/14/08, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Pointing out to an oddity
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 10:55 AM
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Kwan Ting Chan
> <ktc at ktchan.info> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 17:12 +0200, elisabeth bauer
> wrote:
> >
> > > I don't see any candidates on
> > >
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Candidates
> > > (the place where I would expect candicacies to
> show up)
> >
> > Candidate's submission is on
> >
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Candidates/Submissions.
> Once the close of candidate submission period comes round,
> the election
> > committee will transfer the listings of those that are
> verified to be
> > eligible to the page you linked to, and translation
> will also begin.
> >
> > Wily D wrote:
> > > Apparently we're not supposed to know that
> they exist yet - I don't
> > know why.
> >
> > They are available on the submission page if one want
> to see it. The
> > committee would just prefer they not be as visibly
> available until we
> > have confirmed the candidates meet the eligibility
> criteria and that
> > their candidate submission meet the election
> regulation. This is partly
> > to ensure fairness to all those who stand. Say a
> candidate submission is
> > too long (as has been the case a couple of time), it
> does take time for
> > them to correct it. In the mean time, if it were all
> widely visible, the
> > other candidates can/will complain about unfair
> advantages gained over
> > the exposure to the longer statement.
> >
> > KTC
> >
> 
> 
> Then you should remove submissions that are too long (that
> part at least is
> trivial to check), or take less time promoting the ones
> that are okay, or
> handle all submissions in private.  However, hiding all of
> the ongoing
> submissions on a somewhat hard to find subpage is not a
> good answer in my
> opinion.  Seeing who intends to stand for the elections and
> why has an
> important influence on recruiting others.
> 
> Incidentally, my instinct was the same as WilyD's, and
> I added another link
> to the submissions page prior to seeing this discussion.
> 

I imagine keeping submissions private would hurt translation efforts.  I don't see the harm in having them somewhere hard to find so they are available to be worked on before they are advertised as being available.

Birgitte SB