Talk:Wikimedia Foundation elections/2021/2021-09-07/2021 Election Results

Cantonese Wikipedia was the largest wiki with zero turnout?

As a bureaucrat of the Cantonese Wikipedia I feel compelled to respond to the report's point that Cantonese Wikipedia was the largest project with 0% turnout. Cantonese is unusual in the sense that it is widely spoken (about 70 million speakers worldwide) but due to educational systems in places where it is natively spoken, there are essentially zero monolingual yet literate Cantonese users. Those who vote in the elections are likely those more interested in the global Wikimedia community, and therefore a significant portion (in this case, 100% of Cantonese Wikipedia editors who voted) would have first registered as a Wikimedia editor at a different project. The way voters are counted in this year's vote - by "home wiki" according to the wiki of first registration rather than most active participation - means that language communities with few monolingual speakers like Cantonese are artificially under-reported. I myself, for example, would have been counted as an English Wikipedia voter because that was my first wiki of registration, even though in recent years my most active WMF projects are Cantonese Wikipedia by time spent and Wikidata by editcount.

In response to this report, I did an informal poll on the Cantonese Wikipedia Telegram group. 15% of those who responded said they had voted. This number is likely an over-estimate (those who join a Telegram chat group are probably more likely to care about the wider Wikimedia sphere than just editing articles), but it would suggest actual turnout among yue.wp editors wasn't orders of magnitude lower than the global average. Deryckchan (talk) 22:45, 9 September 2021 (UTC)