On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 8:57 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:

I've just been looking at the image filter referendum. Could someone from the Foundation please explain what you hope to gain by holding it? The questions are extremely leading, so I doubt you will learn anything useful from it (is anyone really going to say that they don't think it's important to be culturally neutral?). Are you hoping to determine people's priorities by seeing which ones they rate as 10 and which as merely 8 or 9? If so, why? Can you not just implement them all?

Aside from the definition of culturally-neutral (does it mean it should include anything that any culture would consider controversial or only things that most cultures would consider such) and the general phrasing of the questions, it seems that getting to the referendum is made quite complicated.

While the eligibility rules would encourage wide participation, the 1) click on sitenotice 2) read wall of text 3) go back to your own wiki, but remember the arbitrary string "Securepoll/230" that doesn't mean anything in languages other than English 4) find and use the search function 5) click the "go to vote" link sequence is not very user friendly or usable even for the more experienced of editors.

Given the prominence it is given with the sitenotice, things could be made easier for the users (e.g. move the wall of text to the securepoll server – even if it makes localization a bit more difficult; and make the sitenotice point to the voting server directly or at least to the on-wiki redirects) with relatively little effort.

Best regards, Bence

My understanding was that this referendum was intended to give the community some say in what happened with this proposed feature. The questions you are asking don't do that in the slightest. If you want to be able to say the feature has community support, you need to actually ask the community whether or not they support it.

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 20:57, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:

I've just been looking at the image filter referendum. Could someone from the Foundation please explain what you hope to gain by holding it? The questions are extremely leading, so I doubt you will learn anything useful from it (is anyone really going to say that they don't think it's important to be culturally neutral?). Are you hoping to determine people's priorities by seeing which ones they rate as 10 and which as merely 8 or 9? If so, why? Can you not just implement them all?

My understanding was that this referendum was intended to give the community some say in what happened with this proposed feature. The questions you are asking don't do that in the slightest. If you want to be able to say the feature has community support, you need to actually ask the community whether or not they support it.

Ah, that reminds me on Milosevic's referendum from 1998. ... Actually, after searching for the precise question, I've realized that the question itself was neutral ("Do you accept involvement of foreign representatives in the process of solving problems on Kosovo?"). At the other side, need for justification of already made decision and propaganda around it makes them very comparable. In other words, this referendum is worse than Milosevic's one.

I have to say that I was thinking to give vote in favor. However, after this kind of gaming community's opinion, on the line of many infamous referendums in totalitarian regimes and banana republics, I will boycott it.