Talk:Affiliate-selected Board seats/2019/Call for Candidates

Exactly 2 endorsements

1. Who made this rule that there should be exactly 2 endorsements for a valid candidate?
2. What is the idea behind this detail?

To me it looks a strange rule, easy to overlook and somehow disfunctional. Why not 3,4, 10 endorsements? A minimum number I understand, but what is a maximum good for??? Looks like superfluous complication. Kipala (talk) 20:00, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

It was discussed and agreed at the Wikimedia Summit, where most of the affiliates that take part in the selection were represented.

I made the original proposal (i.e., setting an upper limit for endorsements). In my opinion, the goal of the endorsements is to ensure that a candidate has at least some support from the people who will have to vote for it: hence requiring that you have at least one endorsement make sense. If nobody is willing to endorse you, it is hard to believe that you have any chance to be elected. To understand this a few endorsement are enough: asking for two, instead of just one, has the advantage that your own affiliate (most candidates are leaders in an affiliate) is not enough. Allowing for an unlimited number of endorsements, on the other hand, pushes candidates to get as many endorsements as they can. In this way, the endorsements can easily degenerate into a pre-voting. Since we are actually in a voting process (and not a consensus-based process, or a committee decision), and the organizations that can vote are the same organizations that can give endorsements, this would result in a distortion of the process. - Laurentius (talk) 07:58, 3 May 2019 (UTC)