Which reminds me: For future issues, we could set up a special "voting" page at the wikipedia, where proposals can be submitted (with several options to choose from, including "just leave it as it is"), where every logged-in wikipedian can vote (once!), with a time limit (say, one or two weeks) so everyone get a chance to vote, but it won't hang there forever. Democratic enough?
I've been thinking about this for a while, and currently I'm tending towards a scheme where a user would insert a magic link into a page (talk or otherwise)
[[=poll=]]
or something like that. Rendered, this would first show a red link
Create a poll
On that page, the user could then set poll questions and voting type (I would love to allow both preferential voting and normal voting, and more voting systems could be added later). The poll would then be given an ID and the magic link would be changed to
[[=poll:id=]]
where id would be the poll's internal ID number. Rendered, this would then put a nice selection box
option [ ] option [ ]
on the page. For preferential voting, the [ ] would be an entryfield where the user enters a number from 1 to n, n being the number of options. Otherwise the standard radiobutton.
The poll creator and sysops would have permission to modify the poll. On modification, the poll votes would be reset.
There should be a way to show recent polls, and the poll creation page should require a textfield like this:
Please describe the purpose of the poll in terms that are understandable to people not yet involved in the debate who might be interested. _______________________________ _______________________________
I'm currently torn as to whether we want to record and possibly show who voted how. This has benefits in many situations, it makes abuses visible and creates a better picture of the opinion spectrum. The downside is possible peer pressure to vote a certain way. If it's visible, it should probably only be shown once a user has voted. Abuses could become a serious issue as accounts are trivial to create on WP. IP recording (maybe as hash? we record them clearly in many places anyway) is essential to avoid duplicate votes from a single IP.
If we have such a system in place, we can give sysops the permission to create special polls:
[[=spoll=]]
which would be a poll only usable by sysops but visible to anyone. Such polls could show up in another list, Recent admin polls, so that admins could easily see what new issues have come up.
What do you think about such a scheme?
Regards,
Erik