[Foundation-l] Call for nominations: chapter-appointed seats on the WMF Board of Trustees

[Bence Damokos]

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 1:13 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 2 February 2012 00:06, Cristian Consonni <kikkocristian at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Anyway, from the results of the least chapter and community seats
> > election my opinion is that the former are *waaaayyy* more
> > en.wiki-centered than the first.
>
> Really? How do you work that out? The current occupants of the chapter
> seats are one English Wikipedian and one German Wikipedians (50%
> en.wiki), the community seats are two English Wikipedians and one
> German/Chinese Wikipedian (67% en.wiki). (Judging by their biographies
> at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_of_Trustees )
>
> He was talking about the election, not necessarily the result. But in any
case, that is still a 33% difference.
I think the community elections are sometimes perceived as en.wikipedia
centric, even if the actual voter turnout could suggest otherwise. (I
haven't been able to find voter statistics per project, so the perception
might actually be correct even if the people who win are at least partially
international.)

Anyhow, the nice chart at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_of_Trustees does suggest
that editors of the English Wikipedia or people of an Anglo-Saxon
background tend to occupy around half of the elected seats at any time;
while the majority of the appointed seats seem to be held by people who fit
this category. At least this is a general perception, of course many of
them edit other projects, live in different countries and speak languages,
but you can't help if people have a perception that the chapter selected
seats might not be as en.wiki centric (although, there is a good chance
that we simply continue the pattern of choosing an English and a
non-English native speaker trustee).

Best regards,
Bence