[Foundation-l] Board elections : some thoughts

Sat Apr 30 18:50:14 UTC 2005

On 4/30/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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

I don't agree with the conclusion you draw from this graph. The
English and German Wikipedias are much larger than those in other
languages, so it's only to be expected there will be more votes coming
from those. Taking the number of active editors in April 2004 as my
measure, I find that French participation is remarkably large, but
English and German is not much more than would be expected from a fair
division over the languages. In numbers (top 16 Wikipedia languages;
numbers are number of editors, number of voters, and the second as a
percentage of the first):

French  321  89  28%
Finnish 33   5   15%
Norse 27  3  11%
Italian 69  7 10%
German 1613 145 9%
English 2746 238 9%
Dutch 191 16 8%
Chinese 143 11 7%
Esperanto 44 3 7%
Polish 124 8 6%
Swedish 98 6 6%
Danish 67 4 6%
Japanese 360 18 5%
Spanish 123 6 5%
Hebrew 69 3 4%
Portuguese 67 0 0%

Andre Engels