[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Wikimedia Board Elections

[oscar]

yesterday a friend of mine gave me this (script-generated) counting of votes
cast over the languages in the various projects so far:
(this is no final result, one can count this oneself from
[[Special:Boardvote/list]])

english - 1003
german - 320
french - 124
dutch - 101
spanish - 89
finnish - 52
italian - 48
japanese - 38
portuguese - 37
norwegian - 30
turkish - 28
commonswiki - 26
(rest less than 25)

for example, the few amount of voters on ja: is striking, in view of the
size of the project.
in general, the 4 biggest voting languages are all west-european (over a
hundred votes each).
i think can we draw from this the conclusion that various projects are
concerned with "international affairs" rather differently each in its own
way, the size of a language project or community not being a yardstick for
its international engagement and involvement.
it also means that just having access to the english voters is quite enough
to win, they are by far the largest contingent.

it is my conviction that for the future, more than "just" translations for
elections (i take them as an example of a bigger thing to consider here) are
mandatory to evercome this *gap in culture*. (a point of attention for the
board retreat imho)

oscar

On 9/20/06, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/17/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 9/17/06, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> > [snip]
> > > I completely disagree with this; I would much, much rather know *more*
> > about
> > > the people I'm voting for, rather than less
> > [snip]
> >
> > So are you honestly saying that you'd spend 14 hours reading candidate
> > statements?
> >
> > If thats true I suspect that you would be alone.
>
>
> Sorry, are we talking about the same projects? 'Cause I'm talking about
> the
> projects where people spend days (years) arguing about process and whether
> Pokemon is notable (among other time-consuming activities). I suspect that
> there will certainly be people in this environment who will happily spend
> 14
> hours reading candidate statements; I for one would welcome the
> opportunity
> to do so. What other people choose to read or not read is irrelevant to my
> own decision-making processes.
>
> As for translation, which is of course very important, I think the best
> solution is probably more or less what's been done for this election --
> make
> sure that every candidate provides a short statement of approximately
> equal
> length; make sure that this statement is assiduously translated into as
> many
> languages as possible; but then allow (and encourage) candidates to post
> as
> much additional material as they wish, in whatever language(s) they are
> comfortable in, with no guarantee it will get translated. The fact that
> some
> candidates will have more materials than others is no more unfair than the
> fact that some candidates are more voluble on the mailing lists, or that
> some have global rights and are thus perhaps better known across projects
> than those who don't, or that some candidates come from en: and have thus
> perhaps interacted with more potential voters, etc. etc.
>
> -- phoebe
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