Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-05-19/Board elections

This week, the Signpost covers the election process for the 2008 Board elections.

Candidate entries for the Wikimedia Board of Trustees election closed on Thursday. Fifteen users will be vying for one (1) one-year seat, to be filled in the election.

Voting will run for three weeks, from 1 June through 21 June. While the rules of the election are largely completed, some minor changes may still be introduced. The voting method will be the Schulze method, a form of preferential voting. The voting software will allow multiple candidates to be ranked the same (if the voter has no preference for either), and allows voters to leave candidates "unranked" (in which case, any ranked candidate is preferred over an unranked one).

Under discussion currently is a proposal to send an official e-mail to all eligible voters regarding the election; this proposal is contingent upon its technical feasibility. According to election committee member Jesse Plamondon-Willard, discussions with Wikimedia system administrators "seem promising".

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. To discourage sockpuppeting, 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.