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Community view

Have your say in the 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections

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By EpicPupper

The Wikimedia Foundation Board election process for 2022 started in April. Twelve Wikimedians have submitted their candidacy, and six members of the Analysis Committee have been confirmed at the time of publication. The Analysis Committee is responsible for evaluat[ing] the candidates against the skills and diversity, equity and inclusion criteria shared by the Board of Trustees. An affiliate shortlisting period will be held from July 1 to 15, and a community voting phase is scheduled for August 15 to 29.

To help inform affiliates on the wishes of the community, The Signpost is holding a poll to select a potential shortlist. To participate, please use this link; contributors can select "yes", "abstain" or "no" for each candidate. The top 6 candidates will be published and recommended for affiliates to select for shortlisting. Please use your username in the "name" field; only the Signpost Editors in Chief (EpicPupper and JPxG) will have access to the vote logs. Once done, please email one of the EiCs to confirm your vote. Duplicate votes will not be counted.

Edit count statistics are tallied below for each candidate, for voter convenience.

Thank you for sharing your views!

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29 May 2022
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    These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

    I'm surprised that half of these 12 have less than 5,000 total edits -- a few with less than a thousand total edits -- hardly enough to get a good feel for the mood & environment of any one project. And yet the Analysis Committee found them qualified. -- llywrch (talk) 19:50, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    @Llywrch: The analysis committee has not convened. When it does it will eliminate about half of these candidates. The North American analysis committee member has not yet been appointed; see these notes from the meta:WALRUS meeting last night to select one - meta:WALRUS/May 2022. Bluerasberry (talk) 19:58, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Then the lead of this article is confusing. The first sentence discusses the candidates for the Wikimedia Foundation Board, the second the Analysis Committee. While I might have been a bit hasty in connecting the two, it's not helpful mentioning both together without explaining their relationship. Say, these are positions we'll be voting on in the coming days. -- llywrch (talk) 21:19, 1 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    "wishes of the community". Just to be clear here, when we say "the community" we're talking narrowly about people who are on English Wikipedia, who read the Signpost, who are interested in this election, and who take the time to fill out this unofficial poll (Not to mention highlighting edits as a proxy for qualification to serve on a board). That seems neither inclusive nor diverse. Ckoerner (talk) 18:32, 1 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    @Ckoerner: I'd like to highlight some aspects that you mentioned that are present in normal elections: only people who are "interested in elections" will vote, and only people who take time to do so will. Unfortunately, I believe that this is the best way forward; the Wikimedia Foundation has decided its preferred method, and in that method shortlisting is not the responsibility of the community. Thank you, 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 20:30, 1 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Hey @EpicPupper thanks for replying. I hope my comment wasn't viewed as being too pointy. I want to call you in (and others reading), not call you out. Text is hard. :) I appreciate the attempt to help inform affiliates and just want to make sure we're being honest with our language. Everyone is busy and I'd hate for the framing of "the community" to be misconstrued by affiliates.
    True to that aspect of who shows up. Of course only folks who are interested will vote. Same with people commenting on Signpost articles. :p That doesn't really refute the gist of my comment. I'd hope we'd do our best to help folks who struggle to find the time to participate as they are often the most overburdened and underrepresented in community governance (folks who have minimal time to volunteer, English isn't their primary language, aren't aware that there are even elections(!), etc.). Bringing those folks into the fold would give us a much more representative view into the wishes of the/a community.
    A small clarifying point. If I'm following things on Meta correctly, and I think I am, but would love to be politely corrected if not because it's A Lot! The method of election governance was developed by a board selection task-force (all members of which are community-selected) and the Elections Committee (also made of volunteers).
    That's after the two call-for-feedback sessions in 2021 and 2022. Foundation staff are following the process approved by these volunteer-led groups. So "the Wikimedia Foundation has decided its preferred method" is more accurately "the Wikimedia movement has decided its preferred method and the Foundation is carrying out those wishes" from my perspective. Ckoerner (talk) 15:01, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]


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