[Foundation-l] Restricting Appointed members (Proposal).

Sat Mar 22 12:32:14 UTC 2008

Lars Aronsson (that's me) wrote:

> The requirement for voting in these board elections has been at 
> least 400 edits in a single project over at least 90 days. The 
> number of voters have increased from 1484 (2005) to 4170 (2007). 
> But I find no information on meta how many voters were eligible. 

So I did a little analysis of the database dumps.  It appears that 
we would have 800 eligible voters on the Swedish Wikipedia.  I've 
only counted usernames (not IPs) with at least 400 edits, and I 
have excluced usernames that contain "bot".  However, I have not 
removed sock puppets or recently created accounts, so I could be 
off a little, but not by an order of magnitude.  However, the 
democratic aspect is evident in this comparison:

  Language   Worldwide    Eligible       Speakers   Admins  W/A
             speakers     wikipedians  /Wikipedian
  Icelandic      300,000       54          5,500      24     2
  Swedish     10,000,000      800         12,500      81    10
  Danish       6,000,000      245         24,500      38     6
  Arabic     422,000,000      197      2,140,000      14    14

The Arabic Wikipedia could maybe use a few more admins.  With only 
five more they would have one admin for every ten eligible voters, 
just like the Swedish Wikipedia. But then they need to recruit, 
recruit, recruit.  Only 197 contributors have done more than 400 
edits.  All Arabic countries can't be all that poor, computer 
illiterate or censored.  You could probably double that number by 
only recruiting students at U.S. universities, not to mention 
France.  Print some posters and brochures in Arabic.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se