UDWiki:Open Discussion/Voting Guidelines

At the moment, there's a policy being discussed here about making English the sole official language of the wiki administration. More specifically, it has been created as a result of some votes on A/D/S being made in languages that can't be understood by the majority of the Wiki (from memory, Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch, Italian and German.)

It's clear that a strict "English Only" rule is not wanted by the majority of the wiki community. However, it does seem that most people do agree that the bolded part of the vote should be easily understood by the Wiki community (or more correctly, whoever counts the votes.) Basically, I'm proposing a guideline change, which adds the following clause to voting guidelines on administration pages (A/D, A/D/S, A/PD,) to include the following:

The stance of a voter must be easily understood by the Wiki community. Ambiguous votes will be struck.

(Commentary is not covered, only the bolded part.)

I would much prefer this to be a guideline change, as opposed to a new policy. If the community seems to want this as a policy, as opposed to a guideline change, I'll ask for this page to be moved to A/PD. Of course, the wording is up for discussion.

Thoughts? Linkthewindow  Talk  09:08, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Discussion

I like it, and the idea sounds good. I think the word "stance" is ambiguous though, and the phrasing might be better if it read as, "The bolded part of the vote..." for that first part. Alternatively, we could just say something along the lines of, "The only acceptable votes are Yea, Nay, or easily understood variations thereof. All others will be struck." —Aichon— 09:50, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Well, there's a For and an Against section for votes to be placed in, so how is there any ambiguity? There's no actual need for a bolded word of any kind. Whatever else people add (if anything) is irrelevant, all that counts in voting terms is their signature's placement in the relevant voting category.--Mallrat ^{TSI TKS CTD} 10:27, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

We aren't just talking about policy discussion. There are no for and against sections on A/D or A/D/S. Linkthewindow  Talk  10:31, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

I still don't see why there's any need for this, since the voting guidelines are pretty clear on most pages.

For example, there's this voting style:

It seems pretty clear to me.

Then there's this style:

Again, pretty clear.

Then there's A/D, A/SD, etc.

Okay, here I can see a change being needed to prevent people from arguing that their submission had a "short and to the point" deletion reason, just in Uruk-hai. Although I think it would take only one or two precedence setting vote-strips due to general f*%^tardery for it stop being an issue. If any page might need an English-only clause, it's these admin ones and only these ones. -Wulfenbach 11:05, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

It's to make it clear that votes must be understood by everyone, and to give people the power to strike them when people go ahead and do it anyway. Yeah, with a strict reading of the rules, it might be redundant, but a bit of redundancy to reduce ambiguity is only a good thing. Also, the A/D/S rules need a rewrite - under a strict reading of that rule, the vast majority of these votes are invalid. Linkthewindow  Talk  11:10, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

I quite like your second one. While we are at this, would it be worth standardizing all Wiki voting (so it's in the A/PD standard,) instead of having three different systems for doing the same thing. I've never understood why we don't use a derivative of the A/PD voting for deletions and scheduled deletions, anyway (as A/PD is a superior system, imo.)

If we did that, we wouldn't have to worry about adding in a "languages" clause anyway (as you don't need a bolded word in an A/PD system.) Linkthewindow  Talk  11:10, 29 December 2009 (UTC)