Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:

First, let me thank Eric for his effort on this.

Second, I am wondering if some further clarification might help. Some are not necessary for this time, but nevertheless important issues for the future multilingual voting. So I list them anyway.

(1) If we should be a registered user in meta in order to vote.

This should be essential, but we have no way of preventing people from having multiple registrations.

(2) If we should vote in individual language-wiki. (3) How to count votes of those who have multiple usernames across multiple languages. (4) If we need any weighing of votes by language - balancing voices from less-populated wikis with populated wikis.

This will matter in some issues, but not all

(5) If we care preventing a username.

Probably not practical, and the banned users are likely to be so few as not to have a statistically significant influence on the voting

(6) If we need some time to make translations of the voting page in multiple languages.

The importance of this will vary with the issue

The more I think about this kind of procedural difficulties, the more I feel uncomfortable relying on voting as a measure of conflict resolution. Especially when the stake is high and there is some serious disagreements, I suppose designing a good voting system could be very difficult. We might need some bureaucracy for it.

The usefulness of voting varies inversely to the importance of the subject. There are numerous opinions on the matter of article count, but nobody sees this as a core value for Wikipedia. A voting procedure here helps us to choose between a number of reasonable alternatives, that have not reached conflict level. Having Wikipedians vote for an official stand on the Israel/Palestine conflict would be insane.

In applying Erik's proposal we are experimenting with trying to find what works

And here is another issue. This one definitely needs some clarification, though it has nothing to do with multilinguality of the issue.

With this type of voting, we may vote on each combination of the options only when the number of options are small enough:

*size=20+; restrictions=stub flag+ comma; additional=frequency by 50bytes. *size=20+; restrictions=stub flag+ two paragraphs; additional=none. *size=205+; restrictions=none; additional= A4 pages and so on. Currently, we have:

4 options in size category, 4 options in further restrictions category (except for no-restriction), and 5 options in additional stats category.

This already means 4 * (2^4) * (2^5) = 2048 combinations.

Well, so I guess we wouldn't like to do that.

This sort of problem is inevitable when the number of options is open-ended.

An alternative would be to vote separately on each item, disregarding the combination.

Weighted voting can help here, but I find that Erik's proposal to use 1 for the preferred option and 6 for a less interesting one to be backwards.

Then of course, there would be a risk of resulting in a combination that no one favored. (e.g. 250 bytes in size and two-paragraphs as the further restriction turn out to be the best of each category.)

That risk is always there

Another possibility that I can think of is multi-staged voting. We first vote on size. Then given the result, we vote on further restrictions. Then with the size and further restrictions in mind, we vote on additional stats. I guess this would be a good way, except that it takes more time to finish.

In these circumstances the purpose of the first ballot would be to create a short list. With numerous options available, very few will receive more than one or two votes. When the first ballot is finished eliminate anything that did not receive more than 10% of the total vote, or some other workable criterion.

Eclecticology

very good questions !

--- Tomos at Wikipedia wiki_tomos@hotmail.com wrote:

Second, I am wondering if some further clarification might help. Some are not necessary for this time, but nevertheless important issues for the future multilingual voting. So I list them anyway.

Save them ! But there are so many points to clarify that we could limit ourselves to the current situation maybe ?

(1) If we should be a registered user in meta in order to vote.

Not necessarily registered in meta (or loggued in). But it might be interesting to be able to contact the one who voted. And since there are about 30-40 wikipedias now, it's tough to guess who comes from where...

(2) If we should vote in individual language-wiki.

I think we should have the choice to do both. Those who don't speak english will prefer to do it in their language. Those who speak english might do it directly in meta. And some trusted members could transfert votes from individual wiki to meta. Imposing votes to be "registered" only in meta would exclude all those who don't speak english, and this is not the good way.

(3) How to count votes of those who have multiple usernames across multiple languages. (4) If we need any weighing of votes by language - balancing voices from less-populated wikis with populated wikis.

You mean indirectly favoring the situation where the english get "best" when international get "good" ? (Andr�, both "best" and "good" are positive, while "crippling" is negative; getting only "good" for the en, and "best" for the others, does not imply "crippling" the english wikipedia imho, no ?)

I think that should be considered for each issue differently.

For the comma issue, given that it was raised "again" by the japanese and the french (though for very different reasons - yours is a major reason, ours is just a distraction), I think it would be *real* wrong to consider our voices as been half or quarter voices compared to english ones. Even if it ends up being only "good" for en, and best for the japanese.

Another point is that in this case, people (wikipedians) are voting, not the wikipedias themselves (one or several votes for each of them). And many of us participate to at least two wikipedias. So, are we voting thinking of our mother language, or are we voting for the common good ?

(5) If we care preventing a username. (6) If we need some time to make translations of the voting page in multiple languages.

Could we have more than 24 hours to translate, both sides...24 hours in not enough, especially since wikipedia is stuck most of the time during some wikipedia up hours.

Hope this helps,

yes, it was helpful, thanks Tomos

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