Caramel Bugles and Iowan Coffee

This weekend's road trip had some interesting aspects to it. We originally set out on Friday for Galesburg to visit our friend Don, but when we called him as we left Oswego (basically the last of the exurbs along US 34, which is our preferred route to Galesburg even if it does add almost two hours to the drive time) he informed us that he was still in Palatine and would certainly not be there when we arrived. Since our ultimate destination for the weekend was Waterloo, Iowa, continuing on to Galesburg was no longer all that useful a plan. A brief consultation of an old-fashioned paper map (Google Maps doesn't work well when you have no Internet connectivity) advised a hard right at Mendota onto US 52 to Dubuque. We stopped just outside Mendota and acquired, amongst other things, the best snack food I have encountered in a long time: Caramel Bugles. I've never seen these before and I strongly suspect that they're being test-marketed in central Illinois. It's quite common for us to see odd things being test-marketed when we go downstate; we first encountered Code Red during a roadtrip to Quincy, for example. Anyway, upon determining that these are totally the bomb, we bought out the Citgo station in Mendota. We now have about six bags of the things, and wondering if we'll ever see them for sale within 100 miles of home.

The other mentionable from this trip is Jag's Java, a very nice little coffee place in Cedar Falls, Iowa that we've been to before, but I feel like giving him a little shout out for being there when we needed coffee, all three times that weekend. I'm pretty certain the guy in the picture is the proprietor. They're near the border between Waterloo and Cedar Falls; if you happen to be a University of Northern Iowa student, or just in that area, they're definitely a positive alternative to Starbucks. Jag's doesn't appear to have a web presence, although they do offer free wireless (but what coffeehouse doesn't). We've never actually stayed in the store; they have a drivethrough and we've used it almost every time we've been there.

Finally, some kitty porn:

The election drama continues

The drama surrounding the Wikimedia elections is heating up. The most interesting thing, from my point of view, is Greg Maxwell's single-handed get-out-the-vote effort within the English Wikipedia electorate. This graph, provided by Greg, really demonstrates the efficacy of his efforts; the effect is quite startling.

Also, the Election Committee recently rearranged the "jump page" on Meta; the old version (which you can see here) was designed to make it easy for the majority of voters to find the appropriate voting page by listing the pages for the largest projects at the top. The new version is very prettily organized, but the arrangement (while perfectly rational) makes it hard for the vast majority of voters to find the right page. Greg reports that the number of people contacting him asking for assistance in figuring out how to vote increased considerably after that change was made.

I've also had a few people comment to me about having concerns that either the Election Committee or the Board will simply repudiate results they don't want.

Greg also tells me that while he's asked for volunteers on the Foundation mailing list to send similar emails for other projects, so far the only response was from someone with the French Wikipedia, and that person's proposed email actually sent voters to a page bearing someone's personal recommendations for voting instead of the appropriate voting pages.

The real takeaway of this election is simply how terribly bad it has been handled. Neither the Board nor the Election Committee has done even a halfway acceptable job of communicating information about this election to the various electorates. Fundamentally, I consider this to be a failure of the Board, although it is certainly also a failure of the election commissioners as well. We can only hope that the next election is handled a bit more professionally.

In other news, the Foundation announced yesterday that it had hired Mike Godwin, formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as its general counsel. It is my understanding that the Board intended to delay this announcement until after the election was overJuly 4th (thanks for the correction, Kat), but Godwin broke the news himself by editing his own Wikipedia article to state his new position.

Anti-English-Wikipedia attitudes in the Board electorate

Several of my recent posts have suggested the existence of an anti-American attitude in a significant part of the electorate. This is probably a second-order representation of the real attitude, which is a very marked anti-English-Wikipedia attitude held by quite a few people, including, apparently, Board member Oscar van Dillen. Oscar recently displayed this attitude in his complaints to the Foundation's public mailing list about Greg Maxwell's mass mailing of a call to vote (an example of which may be seen here, or also here on Geoff Burling's blog; note the lack of any encouragement to do anything other than vote). Oscar, either through his own remarkable carelessness, through the deliberate concealment of information from him by his informants, or simply because he was acting as a provocateur, completely ignored that this email (and others like it) were merely calls to vote and are in no way canvassing for any particular candidate. Instead of accepting that this is perfectly reasonable, he complains about how this seems to have come from the Board itself (the implication being that the Board would never have wanted English language readers to receive such missives?) and refers to the messages as "spam", clearly a derogative term.

Greg has privately related to me that he has received dozens of positive thank you notes, and that several people have wondered why this was not done sooner or not done by an official entity of the Foundation. He also relates that several people were confused by the election process and asked him for assistance in determining if they were eligible to vote or how to vote. He has, to date, received a total of four negative responses. Brion Vibber himself publicly thanked Greg for reminding him of his right to vote.

There is quite a bit more negative discussion of Greg's activism on the foundation public mailing list. About half of it is people complaining about spam in general, more or less cluelessly. The other half seem to be people incensed at the use of spam to benefit the English Wikipedia to the advantage of other projects. It is this latter group (and I shan't name names; if you want to find them, go read the thread yourself; it is threaded nicely from the first link above) that are the anti-English-speaking, anti-English-Wikipedia, anti-American elements within the Foundation.

The question that I can't get past is, why would it be so bad for someone to do what Greg did? Why is so much vitriol being spilled over someone's effort to ensure that everyone with a right to vote is made aware of that? This is the sort of thing one expects for elections in some banana republic where fairness is something to be avoided. I would hope that the Foundation would be better than that.

After this, I would be so totally unsurprised to see the Board vote to repudiate election results that resulted in the election of candidates that the current Board doesn't want to see elected. They do, after all, have that power.

Wikimedia Board Elections: America vs. Europe

A theme that has run through my comments in recent days has been the America vs. Europe angle, which some commentators have tried to discredit. Interestingly enough, early numbers show turnout from the English Wikipedia (which is almost 50% American) to be very poor. While both the German and Italian projects are holding direct voter turnout drives (there is even the statement on the German Wikipedia's mailing list that the English Wikipedia has too much influence and so German Wikipedians must be certain to all vote to eliminate this), other people are actively working to ensure that English participants aren't even aware that there is an election going on.

It seems likely that, unless something is done, the Europeans will win this one, due mainly to lassitude on the part of American participants. Americans are a plurality of participants in Wikimedia projects (27% based on statistics gathered last year), and I'd be willing to wager a majority (by monetary value) of donors. It seems quite inappropriate for Americans to be so heavily outweighed by Europeans.

Then again, when the supposedly impartial election committee spews forth nonsense about how two-thirds of voters don't speak English when 45% of last election's voters voted from the English Wikipedia, what can you expect?

Wikimedia Board candidates: The Rest

It seems that I've run out of time, as elections has already begun; I will therefore only make brief comments on the remaining five candidates.

Oscar: The single thing I found most interesting about Oscar is that he deliberate chose a photograph that depicts him smoking a cigarette. I'm not going to say much else about Oscar; it continues to amaze me that someone so totally lacking in either the credentials or the competency to serve on a nonprofit board managed to get appointed to one in the first place. Probably will not be reelected, but only because both Yann and Frieda make for better European candidates than he does.

Uninvited Company: I used to think that Steve was a reasonable person, but then he got appointed to the English ArbCom and quickly proved that he is, instead, something of a petty dictator, what with his little campaign against IRC. Given the way he has abused the meager authority of that office, I have little cause to trust him to be more responsible with the slightly greater authority of the office of Wikimedia Trustee. Will probably not be elected, though.

WarX is another Polish candidate running on a "Hi, I'm a European too" platform, but more specifically to represent the "poorer" countries of Eastern Europe. I see his candidacy as very much similar to that of Ausir's: trying to get more influence for Poland. It's certainly my experience that a majority of Eastern European editors are actively pushing nationalist agendas, and while I've never reviewed WarX's editing career I admit that I worry somewhat about putting anyone from this electorate in a position of authority within the Wikimedia sphere.

Yann: Just what Wikimedia needs, another French board member. Yann, at least, brings some credentials to the Board, although I am, myself, uncertain that the credentials actually mean anything. And he certainly looks rather dashing in that contraption that he calls a rickshaw but which rather clearly is not. Yann is a leading favorite to win a seat in the election.

I apologize for not having more meaningful commentary on these candidates, but my employment obligations over the past week have been unusually heavy and I've simply not had time. Hopefully things will be less wild in the weeks to come and I'll have time for more contemplative commentary as the election concludes.