[Foundation-l] Image filter referendum

[Bence Damokos]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 8:57 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at 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?
>
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.
>