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Posted by: thekohser

The weasels at the Wikimedia Foundation have narrowed the doorway to the club even more than in 2009. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2011/en...

This might be a job for MZMcBride, but is there some way to count how many Wikimedia user accounts would satisfy these requirements? Whatever that number is, we could probably reduce it by 10 percent, to account for the fact that some users will be sockpuppets of the same human being.

Unfortunately, because I am blocked on about 4% of the Wikimedia Foundation's active wiki projects, I am not eligible to run for the 2011 election of trustees. I was going to run on a very simple platform of fiscal responsibility that I think would have been very attractive to a good portion of voters.

Anyway... there are probably about 4.9 billion adults on Earth. How many of them do you think qualify to stand for election to the Wikimedia Foundation board? Is it safe to say that the Wikimedia Foundation's public election of trustees -- as a prerequisite -- excludes more than 99.9% of the globe's adult population?

Posted by: Adrignola

Since it's a community election I imagine people would want to elect from the community. There's enough people on the appointed portion of the board that come from outside.

Posted by: EricBarbour

You watch. As time goes on, the "requirements" for WMF directors will get more and more bureaucratic,
obscure, and byzantine. And more and more likely to select someone that Jimbo and Sue know and like.

Even corporations don't do this to their boards of directors. Usually, all you need is to be a "notable"
person who brings prestige or political clout. Remember that O.J. Simpson was http://www.nj.com/specialprojects/index.ssf?/specialprojects/boardgames/0331directors.html on the
board of Infinity Broadcasting. (Until something bad happened to his wife, of course.)

Wikipedia is now like Citibank or Morgan Stanley.
"Too big to fail". Ha ha.
It'll just switch to selling subprime encyclopedia loans.

Posted by: Sololol

Or how Jimbo Wales is on the board of MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence and was co-chair for the World Economic Forum on the Middle East (a Japanese PM, the Duke of York and ... Jimbo?).

But let's look on the bright side here: think of all the hilariously maladjusted people who can still run. Only banned from one Wikipedia project? I'll get in touch with Runtshit and see if he's interested. Perhaps that Poetlister fellow.

In the mean time, we need to find the single craziest candidate from the current list, in case our darkhorse is a no-show. These people look relatively sane so far (other than actually volunteering to be on the board) but I'm sure someone can dig up the backstories.

Posted by: thekohser

Yes, there's no reason to cater to the readers (viewers) of Wikipedia... make it serve the referees of the game and the owners of the stadium.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Really, would you want that guy on your payroll?

Posted by: sjk

Actually, the voting and candidacy requirements were significantly lowered this year.

2011 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2011#Requirements:
at least 300 edits before 15 April 2011 & 20 edits b/t 15 November 2010 and 15 May 2011.

2009 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009#Requirements were more than twice as stringent:
at least 600 edits before 01 June 2009 & 50 edits b/t 01 January and 01 July 2009.

Roughly 3x as many people are eligible to candidate and vote in this election. Allowance was also made for mediawiki developers.

Eric - Hopefully not. If anything, the participation discussion this year was about http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Board_elections/2011#Participation.


In Wikimedia's case, general notability, prestige, political clout, &c may make someone suitable as an appointed trustee - the selection process for the four appointed trustees is similar to that which most corporations use to choose their entire boards. However the bylaws require that appointed trustees make up a minority of the board.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

It's interesting to me that Wikimedia governance more closely resembles that of a for-profit corporation rather than that of a non-profit. I used to work for a fairly large non-profit. We were governed by a Board of Delegates, some 400 delegates elected by the several subordinate member organizations. Every member of the Board of Delegates was elected, directly or indirectly, by some portion of the membership of the broader organization. The Board of Delegates, in congress assembled at the annual meeting, elects the corporation's officers and the executive committee, and determines the broad direction and policies that govern the organization. Ultimate authority for the organization lies with the Board of Delegates; the executive committee, the president, and the chief operating officer (appointed by the executive committee) make day to day decisions subject to the ratification of the delegates. Unlike Wikimedia, the decisions of the Board of Delegates may not be overridden or ignored by the executive committee; they are binding on the organization. The membership takes the election of delegates very seriously.

How much does this sound like Wikimedia?

Posted by: thekohser

Where do you get your "roughly 3x" figure? Do you have actual numbers that you could share? How many of the hundreds of millions of users of the Wikimedia sites have a vote in the election?

I also notice how you conveniently ignore the fact that 2009 saw no stipulation that voters or candidates "not be blocked on multiple projects". In the past, if you were in good standing and active on one Wikimedia wiki, you could be eligible to vote and to run. Now, if you've soured the graces of just a single admin who's active on two wikis where you're active, you may not vote, and you may not run.

This doesn't sound like a "lowered" set of requirements.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

All part and parcel of "http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-April/065098.html".

Posted by: MZMcBride

It'd be a pretty big pain in the ass to find every eligible voter/candidate, I think. It'd require pretty much checking every single user individually using several queries per user per wiki. It's infinitely easier to simply check the people who actually step forward for eligibility, though a rough number would be nice. Perhaps getting a list of the aggregate counts per wiki of users with more than 300 edits would give a decent guesstimate.

It'll be a small percent out of every registered user on Wikimedia wikis, much less out of 4.9 billion people. Three hundred edits is not inconsequential. For a certain percentage of users, that's fairly easy with some scripts/tools/bots/whatever. But for most users, they'll never come close to 300 edits. On the English Wikipedia, there are approximately 65,085 users with more than 300 edits out of approximately 14,535,512 registered users, for what it's worth.

Posted by: thekohser

That's the gold I'm looking for. Thanks, MZ.

Posted by: EricBarbour

I rest my case.

They don't want their actual users to vote for the Board--the great proportion of Internet users who want to simply look up facts on Wikipedia.
They want a private man-boy's club. Where only obsessed fanatics and camp followers are allowed to vote. Curse the rabble.

Posted by: The Joy

It doesn't help when the Board puts out a survey to determine what the "average Wikipedian" wants or needs and they either throw out or marginalize the negative, but honest, criticism the survey takers give them. It's rude and downright despicable. I still remember doing a survey years ago only for Gmaxwell to say that they threw out the "overly negative" responses. I did their latest survey too, though I doubt they'll take my or any other "lowly" editor's advice. All they want is an echo chamber and a The Get Along Gang (T-H-L-K-D)-style environment.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

So perhaps 6,500 distinct non-banned adults at best?

Posted by: thekohser

Now look what we've done... the mainstream media has noticed how the http://www.examiner.com/wiki-edits-in-national/wikipedia-s-foundation-closes-board-to-99-5-of-community in governance.

Posted by: melloden

The Examiner is not MSM, regardless of how much time you spend writing for it. Hell, they accepted me and I plagiarized my writing sample. I declined of course, because it's not really a respectable media outlet.

Posted by: thekohser

And the New York Times paid Jayson Blair for his content, too. So? It's mainstream media, chump.

Posted by: Theanima

Ah yes, the ever-reliable, unbiased Gregory Kohs. Mainstream indeed!

Posted by: thekohser

Look, Mike... the world's greatest encyclopedia defines "Mainstream media (MSM) are those media disseminated via the largest distribution channels".

Examiner.com gets http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category;1/Top/News than The Guardian, the New York Post, National Geographic, Fox News, the Financial Times, and Globe and Mail.

I'm sorry if that makes you cry. I wonder how much worse you'd feel if you saw the size of my paycheck from Examiner this month, all for writing one story that took me about 25 minutes to put together, thanks to an outside tipster.

Mainstream media, indeed-el-dee-doo!

Posted by: EricBarbour

Gentlemen, please......