[Foundation-l] The foundations of the Wikimedia Foundation (was: Wikimedia Council)

[Thomas Dalton]

On 04/01/2008, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> Whatever its responsibilities, the meta-ArbCom should have its
> membership selected from among active ArbCom members of other
> projects, perhaps as a meta-representative selected by the local
> ArbCom itself. I can foresee arguments based on workload and/or
> removing an active elected ArbCom member from a local project, but I
> think the benefits far outweight the negatives here (a multilingual
> election that is local to no project and attracts only voters who are
> active on meta).

The big problem with that is that projects without their own arbcom
(small projects, I guess) would not be represented. Selecting
admins/crats from smaller projects would be a possible solution.

The committee cannot feasibly be completely multilingual - discussions
have to take place in one language to be at all practical (we can't
have everything translated into every language - it works for the UN,
it won't work for us). That language will, presumably, be English (it
doesn't have to be, but that's likely to work best), so there will
need to be a requirement that members of the committee speak
reasonable English. It's an unfortunate restriction, but I can't see
any way around it.