STOWiki:Policy/Voting

STOWiki Policies
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See also: Guidelines Administrators

This page is an official policy on STOWiki. This policy has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. Feel free to propose any changes to this policy, 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 big changes need to be Adopted or Decreed to be enforced as policy. See Project:Policies for an overview of STOWiki policies. See Category:Policies for a list of proposed and adopted policy articles. Shortcut: STOW:VOTE

When to vote

There are two main uses of votes on STOWiki:

• Policy votes
• Deletion votes

In very rare cases votes may be used for other purposes, and this page details this process.

Terminology

• The issue being voted on and action to take are considered a proposal.
• If the Yes votes win (see constraints below), the proposal is considered accepted.
• If the No votes win (see constraints below), the proposal is considered declined.

The Voting Process

• The issue being voted on should be clearly identified in the discussion page of the article, and a voting booth created. See "How to start a vote", below.
• People now have an opportunity to vote. The {{Vote/Talk}} template explains things for the most part.
• For the decision to be made, the count for the winning side must exceed the losing side by five (5), i.e. 5:0, 6:1, 10:5, etc, and then a waiting period, or vote closing time, of 3 days must be observed before finally closing the vote and taking the proposed action.

Results

• 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 STOWiki users and backing of the admins.
• No wins: Once the vote is closed and the No votes have won, the proposal is effectively declined.
• With multiple-choice votes the comparison is made to the closest competitor.

How to start a vote

Creating the voting booth

Edit the discussion page of the article:

== Oneliner intro text ==

{{Proposal}}
I would like to .....

{{subst:Vote/Talk}}

This will create a voting booth like below, and automatically add the talk page to Category:Votes_in_progress.

Oneliner intro text This is a proposal and requires a vote to be accepted or declined. Please vote below after you have reviewed the proposal. I would like to ..... A vote is in progress! A consensus must be reached by voting before any action is taken. If one side outnumbers the other by five votes for three days, that side is declared the winner. To vote Click [Edit] in the upper-right hand corner of the votes section, and add your vote in one the following methods (note that not all votes will have Yes/No options): {{vote|Yes|~~~~|optional comment}} or {{vote|No|~~~~|optional comment}} Then click Save page and you are done! Replace |~~~~| with |sig=~~~~|| if you have a complicated signature! To discuss the vote Click [Edit] in the upper-right hand corner of the comments section. The voting process See Project:Policy/Voting for full details. Make the following changes based on the outcome: If you are adding the winning vote, or notice that one side is in fact winning: Change {{Vote/Vote}} on this talk page to {{Vote/Closing}} If Yes has won, and 3 days have passed Change {{Vote/Closing}} on this talk page to {{Accepted}} Make the change suggested in the proposal. If No has won, and 3 days have passed Change {{Vote/Closing}} on this talk page to {{Declined}} Do not remove the votes! If necessary, you may archive votes to STOWiki:Policy/Voting/Archivevote. Votes Yes No Comments

Using {{Proposal}} is entirely optional. It has no effect other than drawing people's attention to your proposal.

Drawing attention to your vote

First of all, the {{Vote/Vote}} template will automatically place your vote in Category: Votes in progress. However, if you want people visiting the article to immediately take note of the ongoing vote, you can put {{Vote/Note|<oneliner intro>}} in the article itself:

{{Vote/Note|
* Should we......(short text)?
}}

This will result in the following:

There are one or more proposals to change this article on the discussion page. Please help us make STOWiki better by giving us your input! Should we......(short text)?

If you do not want to explain the vote in the article, you can of course just use {{Vote/Note|<leave blank>}}.

To draw even more attention to your vote, you can show it in the community portal by adding it to Project:Community Portal.

Voting FAQ

How do we know what to vote on?

See the Votes in progress (category) list.

What really shouldn't be voted on?

Here are some cases:

• Administrative issues: The admins who run STOWiki can make certain changes in order to keep the site running smoothly. Admins should avoid unilateral decisions, but sometimes they must take matters into their own hands - for example with legal issues.
• 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 it is not, you can't really vote to keep something untrue in an article. This especially applies to lore. If Cryptic says this is the lore of Star Trek Online, STOWiki users shouldn't really vote to keep some lore that disagrees 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.
• Policy violations: If a page violates policy, the matter really isn't up for vote. If however you do not agree with a policy, you are of course welcome to vote to change the policy!

Why have a vote closed time?

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.

What do I do if my side loses, but I still strongly disagree with the outcome?

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.

What if the loser just undoes the change of the winning vote?

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 STOWiki policy that you can get enforced.