The purpose of this is to have the rules for elections for the Arbitration Committee: who may run, who may vote, and the related procedures.

Timeline

• November 1, 00:00 UTC – all criteria for candidates and voters must be met by this time.
• General question period – from November 1 until November 10.
• Nomination period – from November 12 until November 21.
• November 26, 23:59 UTC - the number of vacant seats and the term length for each of them is finalised. Any seats that become vacant after this time will not be filled at this election.
• Voting period – from November 27 until December 10

Candidates

Any user may run if they meet all the following requirements:

A candidate must present a statement for running, in which (s)he must declare all his/her accounts. This declaration must be made during the Nomination period. A user who has such accounts which (s)he wishes to keep secret from the community for privacy issues must be sent to the old Arbitration Committee; if the account has any issues which would be likely to affect the vote, the Committee may tell the user to disclose that account, and failing to do so is grounds to disqualify the candidate.

Questions for the candidates

Before the start of the time for candidates to present their statements, there will be a period for asking the general questions; that is, questions which all candidates will be asked. Any user who is entitled to vote is entitled to ask as many questions as (s)he wants. Questions must be relevant for the actvity of the Arbitration Committee, and must not be redundant; any question not meeting these two criteria should be removed.

Once a candidate presents his/her statement, any user entitled to vote may ask him/her personal questions. These, too, must be non-redundant and relevant. Questions may be asked up to the end of the voting period; however, it should be noted that the later a question is asked, the less likely the candidate will have a chance to answer it in time for the voters to consider it when they vote.

Candidates are not required to answer all the questions; however, it should be noted that failure to do so may cause users to be less likely to vote for them.

Voting

Voting will be handled by the SecurePoll system. Any user may vote if they meet the following criteria:

1. At least 200 edits, at least 150 of these in the mainspace.
2. At least 50 edits in the 6 months leading up to November 1.
3. Not blocked on English Wikipedia at the time of the vote.
4. A user with multiple accounts may vote with only one of them.
5. Voters have the choice of registering "support", "oppose" or "no vote" for each candidate. "No votes" are not counted and do not impact a candidate's chances of being elected in any way.

A list of all accounts which have voted shall be available. A bot will copy the information to a page which will be sorted alphabetically. These pages serve two purposes:

1. The first is mainly to allow a user to verify that his/her vote was accepted by the system.
2. The second is to allow the community to have some basic scrutiny for the voters; everyone can see who voted, and if there is a suspicion of sockpuppetry, it can be looked into.

Results

• The "support percentage" for each candidate is calculated. The support percentage is the number of support votes expressed as a percentage of the total number of support and oppose votes.
• Those candidates who receive less than 50% support are not elected.
• Those candidates who receive 50% or greater support are ranked in decreasing order of their support percentage. That is the candidate with the greatest support is ranked first, the candidate with the next highest support is ranked second, and so on down to the candidate whose support was the lowest above 50%.
• The vacant seats are allocated, in decreasing order of term length, to each candidate in rank order. That is the seat with the longest term length is allocated to the first ranked candidate, the seat with the second longest term length is allocated to the second ranked candidate, and so on until either there are no more seats or no more candidates with 50% or greater support, whichever is first.
• If there are fewer vacant seats than candidates with 50% or greater support, then only the number of candidates equal to the number seats will be elected.
• If there are more vacant seats than candidates with 50% or greater support, then those seats not filled will remain vacant.
• If any candidate does not, within one week of being asked to identify themselves to the Wikimedia Foundation, do so to the satisfaction of Jimbo Wales and/or the Foundation, or is otherwise found to be ineligible for the committee, including through disqualification, then they will not be elected.
  • The vacant seats will be reallocated as necessary as if they had not received 50% support, that is if they had been the third ranked candidate then the candidate who was previously ranked fourth will take the seat with the third longest term and the candidate previously ranked fifth would take the seat with the fourth longest term, etc.
  • If there were more candidates with 50% or greater support than vacant seats, then the candidate with the highest support percentage not previously allocated a seat will be allocated the seat with the shortest term.
  • If the number of vacant seats was equal to or greater than the number of candidates with 50% or greater support then one (additional) seat will not be filled.
  • Under no circumstances will a candidate who received less than 50% support be allocated a seat.