[Wikipedia-l] Article count reform

[Tomos at Wikipedia]

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

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.

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.

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

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.)

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.

Hope this helps,

Tomos

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus