Talk:Wikimedia Foundation elections/2020/Questions

I want to point out for reference that the 2019 enwiki arbcom election questions number from 15 to 30 questions each, depending on the candidate, almost all of which had been answered by the time voting began. I'd strongly prefer to see a number on the high end of that range for substantially more powerful and influential Board candidates, because the combination of questions to arrive at only ten in 2017 led to some serious inadequacies, such as the priorities question asking candidates to rank the importance of e.g. "Increasing editor retention" without any opportunity or prompting to describe how to achieve that goal, and very few of the candidates taking the initiative to advance any specifics. Given the workload expected of the Board members, answering 30 questions from 45 submissions does not seem to be inordinately burdensome, and affords far greater respect for those bothering to submit them. EllenCT (talk) 12:33, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Granted, PolitiScales is way more than 30 questions

Ref.: [1] EllenCT (talk) 07:01, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

I've decided I agree with Yair rand that these questions are not as helpful as alternatives I am still working on. EllenCT (talk) 05:07, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Political philosophy

Note: as this question contains more than one hundred inside it, please only include it if, in the opinions of the election-runners, an insufficient or undesirably few other questions have been asked. (I personally ask it of the candidates and hope they will see that I do without having to be reminded.) EllenCT (talk) 17:29, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

Please take the PolitiScales quiz and upload the graphic showing your eight scores, and post it as a thumbnail in response to this question. EllenCT (talk) 05:38, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

I extremely strongly object to any candidate for the board answering questions about their personal political views which don't relate to Wikimedia. --Yair rand (talk) 07:46, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

Which of the scales do think do and don't relate to Wikimedia? EllenCT (talk) 17:13, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

None of them relate to Wikimedia. Wikimedia doesn't get involved in political affairs, except in very limited situations where things can directly threaten the projects. The potentially relevant areas are: Laws dealing with intermediary liability (which affect whether it's possible for the WMF to host open wikis), copyright law (upon which much of our content is possible), government censorship of our projects (either direct censorship of our projects or complete restrictions on internet access), and online privacy/anonymity (without which contributing would be impossible for many of our users). --Yair rand (talk) 07:09, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

None? Can you imagine a strict anti-constructionist ("essentialist") supporting collaborative writing? Candidates' theories of justice relate to where they might stand on enforcement of the Terms of Service. I want the ability to vote for internationalists and against nationalists in electing the governance of any NGO, and I can't believe you wouldn't want anyone to have that advantage. Is there any reason to believe that voters informed by these facets of candidates personalities' won't make better decisions in casting their ballots? I'm only slightly inclined to agree, though, because self-reporting in aggregates is potentially subject to gaming. The advantages of allowing voluntary answers outweigh the drawbacks by a lot. Where I would draw the line is closer to asking for disclosure of big-5 traits -- some of them like contentiousness and openness to experience should be disclosed, and I'd love ask candidates to voluntarily characterize those aspects of themselves. In such cases, though, most everyone will report that they are contentious (so you have to derive that from how well they answer all the other questions, among other means) and few people will admit to being neurotic. It's like asking people whether they're above average. While most everyone is in some way, the fact remains that way more than half say they are (which is reasonable if the average is the median and you count all the dead people, but I digress.) I think the political scales represent very similar and at least somewhat overlapping information, and I doubt there are many aspects of people's discretionary choices, involving the Foundation or otherwise, that don't correspond to at least half of them. EllenCT (talk) 08:10, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

Inclined to add another one

I'd like to add something about en:WP:NOTHOWTO, in particular with regard to the chemical syntheses of poisons, which I find, in the case of highly addictive drugs, seems to be honored less frequently than it is for useful chemicals like plastics and proteins. However I have mixed feelings about this so I am holding off for now. I know I said I wanted 35 questions, but I am not sure I want to be the author of more than 11 of them, unless I can add the entire https://politiscales.net which I think is unlikely because it's more than 100 questions. EllenCT (talk) 11:48, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

Multiple questions from a single editor

I could not help noticing that four editors have added a single question while one editor has added ten questions. Does this give the one editor some sort of advantage when it comes to deciding which questions are to be presented to the candidates? Would it be better to reformat the page so that it has "Questions from Guy Macon", "Questions from Blue Rasberry", etc? --Guy Macon (talk) 18:30, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

If it's a disadvantage for the questions, if a lot are posted by one editor, can one "adopt" good questions, so that I don't have to rephrase good questions just to keep a diversity fetish at bay? If I come here and see, all good questions are already asked, I don't bother to look at who did it, as in the wikipedia: the argument counts, not the person. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 18:51, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

If there are more questions than the election committee feels comfortable asking, I'd suggest they offer them each for the community to endorse. EllenCT (talk) 19:17, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

I withdrew two of my earlier questions so as not to exceed the total I set for myself earlier. EllenCT (talk) 04:14, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Inclined to replace removed questions

I would like to replace these questions. EllenCT (talk) 09:39, 28 July 2020 (UTC)