[Foundation-l] board elections : some thoughts

Sat Apr 30 18:14:44 UTC 2005

Anthere:

> Second, the participation rate of languages have been very diversed. 
> English participants represented a huge number of voters.
> German were second and french third. Other languages had basically not 
> participated but for a very few people.
> Link : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image%3AElection_participation2.png

Yes, that's a very good point. The graph you link to does not actually 
show the participation *rate*, but the number of participants per 
language. It might be interesting to compare this against, say, the 
number of very active contributors per language in June 2004:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt100.htm

Doing this, we get the following rates (roughly, as I'm reading the 
number of votes per language from the graph):

41% EN
41% DE
91% FR
20% JA
32% NL
75% ZH
17% PL
31% IT
etc.

Taking just these languages, English and German had average rates, but 
the French participation rate was extraordinary by any measure. Japanese 
and Polish in particular were depressingly low. Hopefully, Datrio and 
Britty will be able to help with that.

In general, I can only really think of one solution -- getting the 
relevant text translated into as many languages as possible. For the 
sake of fairness, we should announce the election in the same location 
in all languages (e.g. Recent Changes). We won't be able to stop local 
"get out the vote" efforts, so we should encourage them instead and hope 
that as many projects as possible make an effort to go beyond the minimum.

> Our project is international. It is not very suitable that such a 
> discrepancy exists.

Agreed, though it's always important to look at the rates rather than 
the absolute numbers.

> Third, last year, some rather heated discussions occured when results 
> were not fully displayed. I would be pleased that this is set before the 
> election, so that editors are not surprised when results are not 
> published. Hence the questions : which results should be published ? 

I'd say at least
- number of votes per candidate
- number of voters per wiki project / language.

> Fourth, do you have overall some feedback to give on last year 
> organisation, so that this year organisers can take them into account ?

I'd like the allowed length of the candidate statements to be clearly 
defined, and the length limit to be enforced. (I suggest 1000 characters 
of rendered text total.) Every candidate will of course be allowed to 
link to a detailed statement without a length limit. I'd also like the 
1000 character statements to be fairly free-form, i.e. every candidate 
should be able to decide for themselves how to use that space.

All best,

Erik