Talk:Vote

Make it mandatory to comment negative votes

Thanks a lot for this very nice piece or work!

I think we should keep the rule that you must leave a comment when you oppose a proposal. Could you implement this? --Martianfreeloader (talk) 10:32, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you :) This is already implemented (in JavaScript). --Push-f (talk) 10:55, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

Beautiful work!

Just some feedback:

• Could the voting section be transcluded from a separate page and the voting function still work on the page it is transcluded on? Transcluding the voting section would allow for it to be protected, say, you don't want anyone, or users under a certain auth level to be able to change the votes.
• Could you add the ability to edit your vote text from the voting text box? If the above feature is implemented, users would not be able to edit their vote text since they could not edit the source, which is currently the only way to change your vote. The extension should take the edited text and edit the page on the user's behalf.
• Is the extension configurable so that you could set it so that only users of a specific user group could vote?
• Could the "Linked account" field in Preferences be more descriptive? For example, instead of "Linked account: 8900953", "Linked account: lectrician1 (openstreetmap.org)" would be better.
• Could the extension be multilingual? Would the voting text "I changed my mind, I approve this proposal." show up in another language for users who are using a different UI language?
• Could a basic visual editor for like what is shown using the Reply tool that's part of DiscussionTools be used so that users can bold, underline, add links, and add images to their vote?
• Could the number of votes be added to a Wikibase instance? That would be cool.

Because you cannot reply to votes with this extension like users sometimes do in proposals, this reminds me of a new admin's feedback on the Request for Administrator process at the English Wikipedia. They stated that it might be good to have a discussion period where users can express concerns and users can counter, and afterwards have a private vote. OSM likely does not need a private vote, however, it might be nice to keep the functionality of the extension where you cannot reply to votes and we have a discussion period beforehand (we kind of already do but maybe it should be expressed on the main page of the proposal before the voting section) where users are supposed to debate. That way we can get out all of the counters and counterarguments and user's votes will be cleanly expressed without any replies.

Lectrician1 (talk) 14:52, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback!

• While storing the votes in a different page could be implemented, I don't think it's necessary because when you want to protect the vote chances are that you want to protect the rest of the page as well.
• Editing your vote text would be technically challenging to implement but it could be done. But I am more concerned about the UX aspect of it because I think after other people have already responded to you, you should no longer make large edits to your vote text because that just results in confusion.
• I don't think that introducing a new permission would make sense because ultimately the extension just edits the page for you so if you have the edit permission you can circumvent the extension anyway.
• Yes I know that showing the OSM user id in the preferences is a bit suboptimal but the extension currently does not store the OSM username at all since it can change at any time. I think ideally the id in the preferences would be linked to your OSM profile but for that the OSM website firstly has to implement a respective endpoint: [1].
• The votes and the voting form are part of the page which means that MediaWiki caches it, which means that it is in the same language for all viewers. While I could disable the MediaWiki cache, I don't think I want to do that because on complex pages that could lead to performance problems. So currently the form just uses the page content language. But my extension supports translation, see [2]. So if the page content language was e.g. in German and my extension supported German all the text would be in German (for everybody). Sidenote: technically translation could be implemented client-side in JavaScript but I'd rather not.
• I'd rather not implement a more advanced editor. I didn't know about DiscussionTools ... integrating with that extension would of course be very nice but also very technically challenging. I don't think I have time to work on that.
• I am curious if there are other extensions that integrate with Wikibase in such a way? But I think a Wikibase integration would be out of scope. What could be done and what I have already thought about is storing the number of votes in the page properties. This would allow querying via the MediaWiki API as well as the implementation of a Special:Votes page that could show a table such as:

Page	Approval	Votes	End date
Proposal:Foobar	74%	16	2022-10-15

But I think I'll hold off on implementing such advanced features for now.

Actually you can reply to votes within the <vote> tag ... if you edit the wikitext directly. Yes I know it would be nice if people unfamiliar with wikitext editing could reply as well but I don't see any easy way to implement that. I don't think that a private vote would be an option for OSM because it would be too easy to manipulate. The way I see it is that the reply feature within votes is primarily used by the proposal author to respond to the comments of opposing votes or to respond to questions.

--Push-f (talk) 03:54, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Ok I looked into DiscussionTools ... supporting it might be feasible. I opened T320777 to get the opinion of the DiscussionTools developers. --Push-f (talk) 07:50, 14 October 2022 (UTC)