Steve-
It is a mess, though
In which respect? I agree that voting using the wiki is always somewhat ugly. When I first proposed adding voting support to the software I was met with wide disapproval for suggesting that voting should be used at all for decision making. Through months of lobbying I and others have managed to erode that opposition somewhat so I hope that eventually voting boxes will just be another tag in the wiki syntax.
All in all, the next time a big vote comes around, there needs to be *radiobutton and cgi-counted votes -
You are very welcome to submit changes to the MediaWiki software to support voting, an external CGI-based solution would be an ugly hack with many of the same problems as the current wiki-based voting.
*excluding repeat IPs
Sure, if you do the sifting of thousands of votes with no software support.
*standard time deadlines
We have them (except for the submission deadline, but we accepted all logos that were still submitted on the same day).
*votes on the deadlines - not just a day or twos discussion.
You can vote on virtually every aspect of the contest -- logo format, number of pixels, number of colors, Wikipedia text or not, etc. In the wiki world we try to avoid voting and seek consensus instead. Someone proposes a specific guideline and if people do not agree with it they express their dissent. This was what happened here. Some people felt the deadline was too short, some people felt it was too long, in the end we voted and there was a majority for extending it. I see no point in wasting time on *voting* on the *voting* deadlines as well. And no matter what deadline you set, you can be sure that Anthere will complain about it.
Regards,
Erik