This week, the Signpost covers the opening of the 2008 Board elections.

The fifth election to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees opened on Sunday. Fifteen users are vying for one (1) one-year seat, to be filled in the election. As of press time, 1,774 valid votes had been cast.

This week, a statistics page was provided by election committee member Jesse Plamondon-Willard. The statistics show the votes by date, project, language and individual wiki. Unsurprisingly, English and the English Wikipedia had the most turnout numerically so far. What was perhaps surprising was the turnout from Hebrew wikis; as of press time, 90 of 272 Hebrew Wikimedians (33.1%) had voted in the elections (more than four times the 8.1% turnout so far across all languages). English turnout is currently at 7.4%.

To help users decide which candidate(s) to support, we compiled a list of candidate questions that we felt were important. These questions are still available, and have been updated to reflect responses made over the last week:

Candidate responses

As in previous years, election officials will monitor votes for voting irregularities, and discount votes as necessary, if it is deemed that some votes are those of sockpuppets. All voters must have made at least 600 edits before March 1, 2008 on any one wiki, and have made at least 50 edits between January 1 and May 29, 2008 on that particular wiki. The wiki for these requirements must be the same one for both, and edits cannot be combined across multiple wikis to gain suffrage. Exceptions to these edit requirements are given to Wikimedia server administrators with shell access, paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation who began working at the office before March 1, and current and former members of the Board of Trustees.