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

Mon May 10 22:23:41 UTC 2004

I endorse this as a proposed experiment.  Should we proceed?  Are there
any major objections to giving it a try for a few weeks?

We can monitor it and bail out of the experiment quickly if we find
that it's out of control.  But it might help a lot.

Tim Starling wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
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