[Foundation-l] Re: Board elections : some thoughts

Sun May 1 07:25:50 UTC 2005

Sj a écrit:
> On 4/30/05, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>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%
> 
> 
> Very interesting.  Thanks for that analysis!  Fr: users are also
> unusually well integrated with IRC.  Clearly the conclusion is that
> eating well makes you productive.
> 
> SJ

I suggest that Erik and André's numbers (voters/very active users and 
voters/user numbers) be added on meta for numbers analysis.

Though this can not be proved by numbers, I think these participation 
rates recover two realities.
First involvement in meta topics. And if we consider number of editors 
involved on meta, numbers of people in #wikimedia, numbers of people on 
board related list, I think the high and lower percentage of 
participation are clearly reflected. Typically spanish editors are not 
very widespread on meta related issues while french are.

The second relaty is the existence of a candidate or not. When there was 
no candidate in one language, this language did not participated much. 
It is my understanding there is a candidate on nl wiki this year, so we 
can probably expect higher participation rate. I however think 
participation rates of es or ja will not be high :-(

ant