Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-07-04/Op-Ed

← Back to Op-Ed

Discuss this story

• 42 % of voters in the 2022 election came from English or German Wikipedia alone

This statistic is not so surprising if you consider that the English and German Wikipedias make up 40% of the active userbase across Wikimedia projects. Projects broadly associated with the Global North account for 85%. We're not a "powerful minority", we're a majority, and majority rule is a feature of electoral systems, not a bug.

I don't think you achieve equity by placing one or two people on a distant and unaccountable board. You get it by using real money and real resources to build up projects serving under-represented regions, so that there's actually a sizeable constituency to represent in the first place. Though, in the interim, I agree that increasing the number of seats at the table (as the proposed Global Council does) would help smaller projects get a fair say. – Joe (talk) 15:02, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I agree it's a feature and not a bug, but it's not an insurmountable challenge to take the edge off this system. I originally wrote this piece as a way to express my unease about not even attempting to make the BoT more representative, but carrying on like this is all going well and there's nothing to worry about here.

There are efforts underway to create regional networks in most regions of the world that would build up these projects, at the same time this is also a question of time economy and who has time to engage in this process. Even if you had the same amount of users from West Africa as on German Wikipedia, the percentage of people sparing the time to engage with a BoT election will be lower.

And yes, the Movement Charter would be a very good opportunity to rethink representation and create a voice for the global Wikimedia community. :-) Philip Kopetzky (talk) 16:21, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

• "Almost every year we go through the process of a community election to elect members of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees." Per meta:Wikimedia Foundation elections there have been only four Board elections in the seven years since 2017, including this year. WaikikiVice (talk) 00:19, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

  Sure, "almost" isn't tangible, and in the middle of the pandemic the terms of the BoT were extended if I recall correctly. :-) Philip Kopetzky (talk) 07:29, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

• I vote for candidates because their positions most closely match what I want to see done. I don't really care who they are or where they're from (and realistically, I'd rather not even know where they're from; that shouldn't factor in at all.) If that happens to be candidates from whatever regions you're talking about, great. If their positions don't speak to me to say "Yeah, that's what I would really like to see the BoT focusing on", well, they're not going to get my vote. In an election, it's up to the candidate to bend to the electorate, not the other way around. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 04:24, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

  Supporting a candidate whose views you agree with is great when you're talking about known factors. Perhaps you want a bigger/smaller budget, or more/fewer technical staff, or more/less attention on a specific legal risk, or something like that.

  However, there are also unknown unknowns. Consider, e.g., that nobody voting in national elections in 2000 knew what would happen on September 11, 2001. The US presidential election was all about domestic policy and how best to fritter away the Clinton budget surplus. No candidate had a platform about what he would do if several airplanes were hijacked, and no voter considered that eventuality. What we needed less than a year later had almost nothing to do with what we voted for.

  While it's not usually that dramatic, we need people who can handle more than the pre-identified headline issues. Diversity (of any type: geographical, linguistic, political, etc.) within a group helps that group when they encounter the problems that you've not thought about yet. Imagine: "Don't schedule this major event that day; everyone on my continent will be on holiday." "We have been overlooking this type of contributor." "This problem might sound unbelievable to people from your background and experiences, but I assure you that it is serious for many of our contributors and worth our time to look into it." "Wikipedia is our most popular site, and I know all of you started off as Wikipedia editors and want to focus on that, but the needs are building up at Commons and in the Stewards' workflows, and they deserve a fair allocation of the movement's resources, too."

  NB that I'm not saying that a diverse group is more important than your favorite issues. I'm just saying that it is also a worthwhile goal for an organization, as it tends to minimize structural risks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:43, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

• Obviously this opinion piece is written from a privileged European, white male perspective, and should be interpreted as such seems performative to me. Boycotting the election requires so little effort. Make a positive change. Translation for discussions with candidates? Pack the board? Move such discussions to the main page? Look outside the Wikipedia movement—are books disappearing from public and school libraries? Is history disappearing from books? Is authoritarianism replacing democracy? — Neonorange (talk to Phil) (he, they) 12:56, 6 July 2024 (UTC) —

  The WMF would rather change their bylaws than us having pack their board, translations would require recipients who have way greater problems than wondering who sits on a far away board of an American organisation. The fact that we are discussing this is already an improvement, and @WhatamIdoing provided a good reasoning for why we need that diversity of experience and skills if we want to prevail in the future. The Movement Charter would have helped make this happen quicker, but it's not a lost cause either ;-) Philip Kopetzky (talk) 07:26, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

• Our executive director is from South Africa. We have had a board member from the Global South, specifically Patricio Lorente from Argentina, who was also board chair for a bit. We have different mechanism for bringing on board members as that improves diversity. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:52, 6 July 2024 (UTC)
• What percentage of eligible voters vote? Unless it's a very high value, I don't see how a boycott would be visible. CMD (talk) 11:42, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

  @Chipmunkdavis, I believe that turnout is typically very small. m:Wikimedia Foundation elections/2022/Results/Community voting said that almost 6,000 votes were recorded. I don't see any estimates of how many people were eligible. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:31, 7 July 2024 (UTC)