Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-08-21/Board elections

The elections for the Board of Trustees continued this week with the call for candidates. The registration period for candidates to declare their candidacies ends this week on 28 August, 2006, and voting will start on 1 September, 2006.

Only two new Wikimedians joined the race this week: Oscar van Dillen and Charles Matthews. In addition, one of the previous candidates, Jon Cates, withdrew from the race for "unforseen circumstances which will limit my ability to fill this role", bringing the total number of candidates to 15. Although there is one week left in candidate registration, the number of candidates is not expected to rise significantly.

The elections officials - Aphaia, Datrio, and Essjay - also clarified several issues that had been unclear since the start of the elections. First, the current elections will only elect one Board member, who will fulfill the rest of Angela Beesley's term until 2007. There had been widespread speculation that the elections were going to elect more than one seat or that the Board would be expanded; the announcement by the elections officials implied that although such a change could still occur, the expansion of the Board, if any, would come after the elections. In addition, the statement also quelled rumors that more than one person would be elected. Board member Tim Shell has already announced his intention to resign later this year, and it is unclear what process will be used to choose his successor.

Another statement by the elections official asked all the candidates to be aware of emails sent to their meta email accounts; these emails would be for "candidacy confirmation". No details were available on what that meant, although most candidates, as of press time, had already been initially confirmed by one of the elections officials.

Finally, there was also a bit of humor in the elections this week as notacandidate was briefly added to the list of candidates. The user's platform, first created by notafish, immediately drew attention and attracted several "endorsements", including one by Mindspillage, signing as "Notmindspillage", who commented that she would "enthusiastically cast notavote for notacandidate, whose notleadership and notdirection will serve the Foundation notwell."