Forum:Retiring the monthly poll

For several months (for over a year, if memory serves correctly) I've been "in charge" of the monthly poll feature on the main page. The poll often gets upwards of a thousand votes every month, which is by any measure a pretty successful thing. However, coming up with poll questions every month is notoriously hard, especially considering the nature of polling allows you to include only a few possible responses. Additionally, while getting 1000+ people to vote is a cool thing, it doesn't do much to stimulate actual activity from those people which, really, is the purpose of featured content and main page content in the first place.

All this is a way of me suggesting that we stop doing monthly polls, and instead adopt a "monthly question" feature. We've had things like this in the past - a user writes a blog post where they provide an initial prompt and ask an open-ended question, then other users leave comments in response to the question and in response to other comments. Some of these questions have been pretty successful at spurring interaction, which is an improvement over an anonymous click-and-vote poll, in my opinion.

I know that there's the concept of boldness, but I believe that this sort of change should probably be accepted by the community before it's implemented. This is especially true because I doubt that I alone will be able to come up with a question to ask every single month.

What does everyone think of this idea? --  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 00:31, April 1, 2014 (UTC)

Discussion
Yeah. I personally find it more rewarding to see hundreds of good comments on a blog rather than hundreds of mere votes. I'm for it. 00:38, April 1, 2014 (UTC)


 * The benefit of this system is that voters (ahem, commenters) are able to dive deeper in their explanation as to why they chose the option, and it allows them to have a rant, talk to other people, and get to know those that picked the same option as them. The problem with this is that some voters like the poll because it keeps them anonymous. Nobody knows who voted for that option - we only know how many people did. And secondly... we gotta keep an eye on the comments, because the last thing we need is to make it look like the YouTube comments for a veery controversial video. K6ka (talk &#124; contribs) 01:24, April 1, 2014 (UTC)
 * The questions we've asked in the past have been pretty uncontroversial, asking for individual opinions. We've had very few issues with users giving unacceptable comments. --  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 01:29, April 1, 2014 (UTC)


 * I didn't even know there was a monthly poll... Embarrassed.png I think that blog suggestion is a much better idea. I tend to avoid polls personally, because I like to explain why I like/don't like/chose the option. WayfinderOwl (talk) 01:34, April 1, 2014 (UTC)
 * The poll is on the Main Page, located along the right-hand side. If you're on a device with a small screen or on a mobile device, it appears near the bottom. --  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 01:39, April 1, 2014 (UTC)
 * This seems to be a pretty fair deal. A blog where we can all discuss our answers is better than a simple answer poll. I'm all for it too. Beds (parlare - da leggere ) 15:49, April 3, 2014 (UTC)

Since the idea of creating a monthly featured "question blog" seems to be getting traction, I wanted to introduce another idea. We're trying to encourage editor participation in answering the question, but it would also be great to be able to highlight some of the more unique, insightful or intelligent comments that we receive once we start asking these questions. So, I'd like to suggest that we implement a system of "upvoting" comments.

My thought is that we can create a template (perhaps call it Upvote). If an editor makes a comment responding to a blog post we make, another user can reply to that comment and add the Upvote tag, which we would then count and tally at the end of the month. After this, we would take the top 1-3 comments and display them on the next month's blog, as a list of popular replies to the previous month's question. We could even keep a running tally of users' upvotes, and give awards to users whose comments receive a large number of votes in a month. The purpose of the upvoting system here is to encourage editors to not only contribute, but to contribute meaningfully and intelligently, to come up with new and original ideas and responses to questions, and to perhaps even spark a discussion.

 + 1 Upvote  To start, I've made a preliminary upvote template design, visible above. Let me know what you think of the idea or the design. --  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 03:19, April 9, 2014 (UTC)