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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