Hi Happy Melon,
SecurePoll has been considered for several years now - it is used for most Wikimedia elections and is a proven system for voting. However, there are some significant disadvantages to using it for POTY, as it is somewhat difficult to set up. At this time, SecurePoll does not have an on-wiki administration console and setting up the wiki-code based galleries is not friendly for our Round 1 voting.
In Round 1, all the images promoted to featured picture status are voted on in categories by the community. Last year, the contest has around 800 photos - you can take a look at the Round 1 archive at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2010/Galleries. As far as I'm aware, there's no easy way to replicate that functionality with SecurePoll, especially without a control panel. (Round 2 has far fewer pictures.)
SecurePoll does have some features that would be great for the contest. First of all, it scales well so the whole community could participate. It can verify the elegibility of a voter and the results are counted. I'm not a developer, but it might be possible to simply improve SecurePoll to a format that would work for POTY and other elections in the future. SecurePoll isn't built out extensively and the documentation is sparse.
I do believe there's potential, but I really don't know how it would work. Currently, Round 1 is a popular vote (the images with the most votes go on to Round 2 and users can vote as much as they like) and Round 2 is smaller and more restricted (only one vote per user, most votes win). Wikimedia has used different types of voting in the past, so SecurePoll is definitely something I'd like to find out more about.
Thanks, Mono
On Sunday, February 5, 2012, Happy Melon happy.melon.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On 4 February 2012 23:56, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
On 05/02/12 00:32, Mono wrote:
This is certainly a "project," but it could be used for every POTY
contest,
perhaps some other contests, and it doesn't have to be elaborate.
However,
as I said, it would be really great if we could get just a couple
people
who have some experience developing MediaWiki extensions to help
program
this in time for this year's contest.
If anyone is interested in helping out or would like some more
information,
please contact me as soon as possible - anything helps!
Thanks, User:Mono
That's a good idea. It is also suitable for new developers getting practise. I can help with this. The most complex bit would be the possible user requirements. Other preferences need to be specified, but its implementation should be straightforward.
I think the next step would be gaining feedback and collecting what the extension should do at some page, such as https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ImagePoll
Do you need users to be able to vote for any picture on commons, or just select from a shortlist gallery? SecurePoll already allows you to use
full
wikimarkup in question/option descriptions; you could just put image tags in each option and quite easily build a gallery that way.
--HM _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l