Technical change in voter eligibility announced while candidates trickle in
A minor change was announced in the election process for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees last week. Meanwhile, with some new candidates added to the roster, it appears that the election will in fact be competitive, rather than simply a matter of approving two candidates for two positions.
The change in the process, announced last Wednesday by election official Bjarte Sørensen, is a technical matter with respect to eligibility to vote. Rather than requiring that voters have 400 total edits on all Wikimedia Foundation projects, the change means that voters must have at least 400 edits on the project from which they cast their vote.
The reason for this is that eligibility will be verified by the software program used for the Board of Trustees election. The program can check the number of edits for the account being used to cast the vote, as well as the date of its first edit (the voter must have been active for at least 90 days), but it cannot confirm that edits from other accounts belong to the same voter. As a result, this is the only way voter eligibility can be determined in the absence of some kind of universal login system that applies across all languages and projects, a feature the developers are still debating how to implement.