[WikiEN-l] Main Page Poll

Wed Mar 3 20:29:38 UTC 2004

James, this should make it more clear what is happening:

Genteen mentioned the discussion about replacing the main page at 17:43 (Eastern) on 21 Feb, and I saw that as my first knowledge of possible change during one of my roughly weekly checks of the Village Pump. By 19:40 a vote on what to do and wehether to do it had been requested. Another person added opposition to a change of the page without a vote or selection process a couple of hours later. At 19:21 [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Main_Page/Test&diff=2478437&oldid=2477466] Eloquence wrote that Eloquence thought that it could go live if nobody insisted on having a vote. 9 hours later I added my voice to those asking for a vote and selection process first, writing that I did insist on one. The proposed page went live anyway, without the vote. People seemed to be hurrying, to try to get it changed before the 500,000 article press release, even though that meant skipping our usual consensus-seeking.

At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page/Test at 17:28 under Taking It Live Eloquence proposed taking it live and holding a poll for 24 hours to see what people thought. At 20:23 that day Perl wrote that it had gone live. During the les than three hours between makingtheproposal and itgoing live, this person who'd objected was asleep and found out about it hours later, on waking.

That didn't matter much. That 24 hour vote after going live didn't happen and Eloquence denied that it was there as for a trial period.

Early on the 24th, Raul started a straw poll to ask people to say which of the new versions they thought looked better. The old one wasn't a choice. About two hours later I noticed the straw poll, added the original main page as a choice and indicated that I favored that one. After about 36 hours on the talk page the poll was moved to an archive. At that point, most not involved in creating the new page had said that the original main page was their preferred choice [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Main_Page&oldid=2528529]. 

So, James, Ed, I most heartily agree that the polling and voting processes which were called for were not well announced or carried out. Nor was there any meaningful attempt at consensus building before going live, since those doing it were focussed on doing it before the press release.

And, of course, so far, most of the negative feedback has not been responded to and there's no sign that I can see of any attemptto build consensus by responding to the objections raised, merely the threat of an edit war if those who object don't continue to show more self-restraint and respect for our community conventions than those who wanted it done as soon as possible.

There should be a vote to see if there is consensus for using the new page. That vote which was proposed three times before the page went live. Since there is unlikely to be consensus, that just might concentrate the minds of those who did it on what they need to do to achieve that consensus.

The two actions most likely to move in the direction of consenus seem to be keeping the community information on the main page and using less space for featured items - those two changes seem to have generated the greatest number of objections to the change.

-----Original Message-----
From: James Rosenzweig
To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 14:02:54 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Main Page Poll

I'm very confused.  There has apparently been a poll
at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page/Archive_14#Straw_poll
for a little while that claims to be deciding whether
or not to keep the current main page.  Two MAJOR
problems.  One, the poll does not allow someone to
vote for the main page as it is right now (all options
are a week old), and it splits the vote so that there
are four different slightly altered types of new main
page (hence four possible places to cast a vote for
the new design), and one old main page (pooling all
the votes for the old main page in one place) -- this
means that the plurality of the vote right now is for
the old main page. Two, most of us had no idea the
vote was going on until now (and frankly, can't figure
out where to vote "I like what we have this very
moment).  Can anyone help me figure out what's going
on?

James Rosenzweig

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