[WikiEN-l] Suggested implementation of Jimbo's quickpoll proposal

Fri May 7 03:58:52 UTC 2004

Jimbo has suggested expanding the power of quickpolls to allow banning 
until such time as the arbitration committee makes a decision. Hence the 
arbitration committee becomes like a court of appeal.

To date, there have been lots of criticisms of quickpolls, on the talk 
page and elsewhere. Most of them have been centred around the issue of 
frivolous use. Jimbo suggested allowing only sysops to start quickpolls.

After some pondering, I've decided I like this proposal. It's reasonably 
democratic, since someone with a real complaint is very likely to find 
at least one sympathetic sysop. The sysop body is heterogeneous. And it 
gives the community a way to take decisive action.

This could be implemented just by posting a policy statement at the top 
of [[Wikipedia:Quickpolls]], saying that only sysops may start polls. 
However, I'm of the opinion that simple technical barriers can be used 
to great effect in enforcing policies. Perhaps we could put each 
quickpoll in an unprotected MediaWiki: message, then have a list of 
{{msg:}} tags in [[Wikipedia:Quickpolls]] itself. The list would then be 
protected, preventing anyone except for sysops from adding items.

Theoretically a user could add a new quickpoll to the bottom of one of 
the included messages. But if they do that, it is clear to all that they 
have understood the policy and attempted to evade it. Others may remove 
the quickpoll not only on the basis of policy, but also because the 
listing is in the wrong place, and is incorrectly formatted.

-- Tim Starling