Elections for four community seats on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees will be held from August 18 through August 31 on Meta. You should be eligible to vote if you have made at least 300 edits before 5 July 2021 across Wikimedia wikis; and have made at least 20 edits between 5 January 2021 and 5 July 2021. Special rules apply to developers, WMF employees, and others. Try the AccountEligibility tool if you are still confused.

The single transferable voting method will be used to tabulate the votes. It's believed this method will favor candidates that have broad support rather than candidates who have intense support from a particular group. Contact your nearest math professor for a simple description of how the method works.

Twenty candidates are running for the four open seats, which will have 3-year terms. How are you going to get enough information to decide which candidates to vote for? The full list of candidates is here with links to lengthy summaries of their qualifications, short essays, and answers to selected questions. But as an experiment this year, the candidates were encouraged to make a short video to introduce themselves. Eight candidates uploaded at least one video, with some providing multiple language versions. Two considerate candidates even provided short versions along with their longer versions. We include these videos below, together with some very basic information taken from the information page for each of the 20 candidates. The order of the list was selected randomly.

But let's start with 36 minutes of about 16 candidates in a ZOOM-style video. (video now deleted at Commons!)

Delay

On August 2, the WMF announced that the election would be delayed "This election was due to open on August 4th. Due to some technical issues with SecurePoll, the election must be delayed by two weeks. This means we plan to launch the election on August 18th, which is the day after Wikimania concludes."

The candidates

Adam Wight

Location: Berlin, Germany, Languages: en-N, es-2; Wikimedian since: 2012; Active wikis: mediawiki, meta.

Gerard Meijssen

Location: (left blank); Languages: English, Dutch;n Wikimedian since: March 2008; Active wikis: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Commons.

Farah Jack Mustaklem

Location: Palestine; Languages: ar-N, en-N, fr-3, he-3, es-2, nl-1; Wikimedian since: 2005; Active wikis: arwiki, enwiki, commons, meta.

Raavi Mohanty

Location: New Delhi, India, Languages: English, Hindi, Oriya, Punjabi, Wikimedian since: 2015, Active wikis: en.Wikipedia, Commons, hi.wikivoyage.org, and 10 other ptojects

Victoria Doronina

Location: Manchester, UK; Languages: Russian, English, Belarusian, Ukrainian; Wikimedian since: 2007; Active wikis: Russian Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Commons, Russian Wiktionary

Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight Video in English.

Location: Nevada City, California, United States; Languages: sr-2 (it is my first language but I speak it poorly now), en-N, es-2, fr-2; Wikimedian since: June 2007; Active wikis: English Wikipedia, Commons, Wikidata

Ravishankar Ayyakkannu

Location: India, Languages: Tamil, English, Wikimedian since: 2005 Active wikis: Tamil Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikidata, Commons

Ivan Martinez Video in English. See also Spanish.

Location: Mexico City, Mexico; Languages: es-N, en-3, nah-0; Wikimedian since: March 2006; Active wikis: Spanish Wikipedia, Spanish Wikinews, Wikidata, Commons.

Reda Kerbouche Video in English.

Location: Batna, Algeria / St Petersburg, Russia; Languages: arq-N, shy-N, ar-4, fr-4, ru-4, en-3 , de-1; Wikimedian since: 2010; Active wikis: French Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia, Tacawit wiktionary (Sysop), Commons.

Douglas Ian Scott Video in English.

Location: Cape Town, South Africa; Languages: en-N, af-2, cmn-2, python, R; Wikimedian since: 2006; Active wikis: English Wikipedia, Commons.

Dariusz Jemielniak Video in English with subtitles. See also English (Spanish subtitles), shorter version.

Location: Warsaw, Poland / Cambridge, MA US; Languages: pl-N, en-4, de-1, ru-1; Wikimedian since: 2007; Active wikis: plwiki, enwiki, Commons.

Ashwin Baindur

Location: Pune, India, Languages: Konkani (first language) (kok-5), fluent in Hindi (hi-4) and Marathi (mr -4), English (near professional) (en-4), German (de-1), Wikimedian since: 26 March 2006, Active wikis: Wikipedia (English), Wikimedia Commons

Pavan Santhosh Surampudi

Location: Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India, Languages: Telugu (Te-N), English (Fluent) (en-4) and Hindi (hi-1), Wikimedian since: December 2013, Active wikis: Telugu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikisource, Commons

Location: Walcourt, Belgium; Languages: French as native, English and Portuguese as good level and all textual world languages through my computer or smartphone ;o); Wikimedian since: June 2008 and very active since early 2011; Active wikis: fr.Wikiversity - fr.Wikipedia - Commons - etc.

Mike Peel

Location: Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain; Languages: en-N, es-1, pt-BR-1, fr-1, python, C; Wikimedian since: 2005; Active wikis: English Wikipedia, Commons, Wikidata

Lorenzo Losa Video in English with subtitles. See also Italian, Spanish.

Location: Milano, Italy; Languages: it-N, en-3, es-2; Wikimedian since: April 2004; Active wikis: Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata.

Md. Abdul Ahad Khan

Location: Dhaka, Bangladesh; Languages: English (en-3), Bengali (bn-N), Hindi (hi-2); Wikimedian since: 2018; Active wikis: English Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource.

Vinicius Siqueira

Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Languages: pt-BR-N, pt-5, en-4, es-4; Wikimedian since: 2007; Active wikis: ptwiki, Commons.

Eliane Dominique Yao

Location: Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire; Languages: French; Wikimedian since: 2013; Active wikis: Wikipedia

Pascale Camus-Walter Long version video in English. See also short version.

Location: Strasbourg, France; Languages: fr-N, en-3 , de-3; Wikimedian since: 2011; Active wikis: French Wikipedia