WiKirby:Community poll policy
WiKirby features a Community poll on its main page which the readerbase can participate in. The main page community poll may be accessed via the {{Community poll}} template. The following are some quick guidelines and policies regarding how the community poll should be handled.
Content
The community poll should be lighthearted in both its question and selection of answers, with a focus more on personal opinion without any serious competition. Under no circumstances should policy decisions on par with proposals be conducted through the community poll. Generally speaking, questions should be relatively simple and straightforward with no more than eight (8) answers to choose from (for the sake of keeping the widget itself relatively small). Questions should relate generally to the Kirby franchise or to WiKirby in particular.
An option along the lines of "I just want to see the results." should always be included as the last choice for those not particularly keen on making an actual vote.
Creating a poll
WiKirby uses the AJAXPoll extension to power the community poll. While this extension is quite versatile, it does come with a few caveats which are worth noting. The following is a quick set of documentation regarding how to use/modify the extension. For more details, please see the MediaWiki page for the extension linked previously.
To create a poll, use the following basic code:
<poll> Insert poll question here Insert answer 1 here Insert answer 2 here Insert answer 3 here etc... </poll>
As currently set up, this will create a poll which displays the question at the top and then a number of choices of answer based on how many lines follow, with the results shown to the reader before voting. To change this to hide the results until the user has voted, use the following for the starting line instead (this is generally recommended for the main page polls):
<poll show-results-before-voting=0>
Once a user has voted, they can change their vote or revoke it at any time. The poll creator can define as many answers as they want, but too many will naturally make the poll difficult to read and throw off the balance of the page it's being used in.
When setting up a poll, it is important to note that changing it in any way will reset the votes (since doing so creates a new poll rather than changing an existing one). As such, it is critical that when setting up a new community poll, the questions and answers are defined correctly the first time, or quickly corrected before any votes are counted.
Poll rotation
Generally speaking, Administrators+ have the authority to change and archive polls as they see fit. However, they should keep in mind the following etiquette when doing so:
- A community poll on the main page should generally be left there for at least two (2) weeks to accrue votes. (The poll will always have its creation date listed, so it should be easy to judge its age.) There is no real upper limit to how long a poll can remain.
- Before changing the poll, the previous one should have its results archived (more details on how to do that below).
- The Admin+ performing the poll change should get general approval from other active Admins+ (especially the Editor-in-Chief) for the new poll they want to implement.
Archiving a poll
Before changing out a community poll, the previous one should have its results archived. To do this, first collect all the information regarding the poll and its results, including total number of votes and the number of votes for each option along with percentages (percentages for each option can be found by hovering over vote counts in an active poll), as well as the date created and the date archived (you don't need to be more specific than the day). From there, head to the Poll Archive and create a new section for the poll up at the top using the following template:
== Poll # - Poll question (start date - end date) ==
{|class="mw-collapsible wikitable"
!colspan=3|Poll question
|-
|style="padding:0px"|
{| class="sortable wikitable" border=1 cellpadding=2 style="margin:0px"
|-
!style="width: 100%"|Answer
!style="width: 25%"|No. votes
!class=unsortable style="width: 25%"|Percentage
|-
|Answer 1
|#
|%
|-
|Answer 2
|#
|%
|-
|Answer 3
|#
|%
|-
|Etc.
|#
|%
|-
|style="background:#aaffaa;"|(top choice; use for the one that got the most votes)
|style="background:#aaffaa;"|#
|style="background:#aaffaa;"|%
|-
|I just want to see the results.
|#
|%
|-
!colspan=3|{{center|'''Total votes: #'''}}
|}
|}
Example
The following is an example of an archived poll (this poll is not real):
| How pink is Kirby? | |||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||||||||||||||
Other uses of polls
Polls can in theory be used anywhere else on the wiki. However, they should generally not be used in mainspace articles, files, or other such pages. Users are free to have polls on their userpages, defined however they wish, within reason.
