Wikimedia board vote 2008 ends midnight Sunday

Posted by ciaran on 0

Elections for one community seat on Wikipedia’s nine-person Board of Trustees will close at midnight on June 21st. I’m eligible to vote, and, for reasons I’ll discuss next week, I have a sudden interest in communiy voting.

The criteria for eligibility to vote are that you have a certain number of edits to a Wikimedia project. Almost 2.5k votes have been cast so far.

I don’t know any of the 15 candidates, so I had to draw up some criteria. The candidate statements were only a minor source of information. What’s important for me in a candidate? I wrote everyone’s name on a page and made notes about them on three criteria.

  1. Activity levels on Wikimedia projects. Unless someone has been active in contributing to Wikimedia projects, it would be difficult for them to know the issues that affect the editing community. So they should have at least a few thousand edits.
  2. Language abilities, for two reasons. First is that while the English Wikipedia is very good, the quality quickly drops when you read the smaller Wikipedias. So I think there should be more focus on the non-English Wikipedias. Second, because there are so many Wikipedia’s, coordination is necessary. To be a good coordinator among projects of many different languages, it helps to be multilingual. Judging someone’s language abilities is hard, but I think being able to contribute paragraphs of text in a language is a very good criteria for being "capable". So I mostly ignored what language abilities the candidates claimed in their statements, and instead judged their language abilities based on how much they have contributed to non-English Wikipedias.
  3. Responses to questions. 50+ questions were put to the candidates. I didn’t have time to read all their answers, and I found that most answers didn’t give me much to base a decision on. But, there was one candidate that I quickly flagged as obnoxious, and two candidates that I flagged as insufficiently interested (since they didn’t answer most questions), and for some of the candidates I put a number beside them if an answer impressed me.

The four candidates that I favour are, in no particular order:

It’s interesting to note that all 15 candidates are male, and almost all are from Europe or North America. Voting ends midnight Sunday June 21st.

UPDATE June 30th: the results are online. I’m very happy to see that Ting Chen won. 3019 votes were cast.

— 
Ciarán O’Riordan,
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