OpenFSG:Policy/Voting
Policies ยป Policy/Voting
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| This page is an official policy on OpenFSG. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow.
Feel free to propose any policy changes, but please make sure that changes you make follow the official process and reflect consensus on the discussion page before you put them into practice. Any changes need to be adopted or decreed to be enforced as policy.
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This will explain how OpenFSG is a democracy, and how a member can participate in the democratic process. It will explain the exact rules of the voting process, and the things that need to be voted on (redirection, moving, locking, splitting and the three-revert rule).
Voting
One way to resolve conflicts or at least reduce their disruption is to have people vote on contentious issues. This article describes a recommended process and is only a policy in that this process has been reviewed and agreed upon via the more stringent process of policy ratification and adoption and should be enforced by the admins.
Normally changes in a wiki just go through a create and edit cycle, but if a situation arises where people revert or change sections back and forth or make some pages redirect pages and some not, or split up pages while some people want all the stuff together, or questioning where content belongs.
Types of Issues for Voting
- Naming articles and categories
- How to organizeg info
- Moving pages (redirects, also)
- Splitting up pages
- Locking pages
- Too many reversions
- Rumor accuracy
Exceptions to this Voting policy
- Policy votes – Policy votes are more strict.
- Deletion votes – Votes to delete pages are simplified.
Generic Voting Process
The following process concerns the general voting on issues at OpenFSG before agreeing on some action or otherwise:
- The issue being voted on and action to take are considered a proposal.
- If the proposal wins with more Yes votes based on constraints below is is considered accepted.
- If the proposal loses with more No votes based on constraints below is is considered declined.
- The issue being voted on should be clearly identified in the discussion page of the article. You can use the following wiki code fragment as an example:
- Code:
{{proposal}};Vote on this::<What you want people to vote on and action to take...>
- It should look like this:
- Code:
- Put the vote template in the discussion page. You can use the following wiki code fragment as an example (the
subst:will put a snapshot of the template in when you save):- Code:
{{subst:Vote/Talk}}
- This will automatically add
[[Category:Votes_in_progress]]to the discussion area.
- Code:
- People now have an opportunity to vote. The Vote/Talk template explains things for the most part.
- For the decision to be made, a vote minimum should be met along with a vote ratio and then a waiting period or vote closed time should be observed before closing the vote and taking the proposed action.
- Vote minimum – I suggest 5 votes for Yes or No. Having only 2-3 votes is too few since it doesn't even begin to represent a consensus.
- Vote ratio – If the vote minimum has been met and the yes votes exceed the no votes by 3 to 1, then the policy is has met the vote ratio. Examples: 5 yes votes & 1 no vote, 6 yes votes & 2 no votes, etc.
- Vote closed time – I suggest 3 days, but we could have a shorter time, like 2 days, if the vote ratio is high (4 to 1 in favor) and the number of yes or no votes is high (8?).
- Yes wins: Once the vote is closed and the Yes votes have won, the proposer should feel free to take the proposed action as accepted with the trust of most OpenFSG users and backing of the admins.
- No wins: Once the vote is closed and the No votes have won, the proposal is effectively declined.
Optional Banners
Voting FAQ
- Q
- How do we know what to vote on?
- A: See the Votes in progress (category) list.
- Q
- What really shouldn't be voted on?
- A: Here are some cases:
- Administrative issues: The admins who run OpenFSG put in certain changes (like using Google to do searches), putting ads on the sidebar, restrictions to posting (like exploits) that aren't really a matter of voting, since they have to do with technical limitations (wiki bugs), keeping the site up (aka paying for it), or external relationships (requests by Blizzard).
- Factual accuracy: Although we can dispute what the truth is, you can't really vote on whether it is true. If someone posts something that appears factually accurate, but someone has a reliable or official source that shows that is is not, you can't really vote to keep something untrue in an article. This especailly applies to canonical lore. If Blizzard says this is the lore of World of Warcraft, OpenFSG users shouldn't really vote to keep some lore that disagress with it on the site. That's just silly.
- Terminology: This is sort of a gray area, but usually its best just to put the all the meanings of a commonly used term and indicate which meanings are widely accepted vs. narrowly understood. You can vote on narrowly vs. widely, but unless the meaning attributed to a term is vandalism, totally nonsensical ("frog means an arrow with a rocket on it that speaks many languages") or that only apparently one person has ever heard, its okay to be in the wiki.
- Q
- Why have a vote minimum?
- A: Similar to the idea of a quorum, a vote minimum prevents a decision being made by two few. The higher the minimum, the better confidence you can have that some significant number of voters participated. We tend to keep vote minimums low at OpenFSG, because only a few people actively vote currently.
- Q
- Why have a vote ratio?
- A: People tend to have less confidence in the consensus and strength of very close votes. The larger the ratio between one side or another the clearer the majority. The ratio picked is semi-arbitrary, but usually prevents winning by 1 vote.
- Q
- Why have a vote closed time?
- A: Think of it as a cooling off period and a time for the losing side to campaign for more votes. If the losing side can't drum up enough votes in the time period, it usually indicates they don't care enough or they can't get enough support. We tend to keep the time shorter than we would for policy issues, but the wait time is generally short just because you don't want to be sitting around waiting for no good reason.
- Q
- What do I do if my side loses, but I still strongly disagree with the outcome?
- A: Propose another vote! We may at some point decide that the result of a vote should "stick" for some time period before allowing another vote, but for now if you want to thrash it out again, you can always do it.
- Q
- What if the loser just undoes the change of the winning vote?
- A: Well, assuming you followed the proper voting process, you can revert the change back, appeal to an admin to revert the change, or even appeal to an admin to block the user for a time period. Hopefully there will be a policy for violating OpenFSG policy that you can get enforced.
