Topic on User talk:ChristianKl/Structured Discussions Archive 1

Hey, thanks for contributing to property proposal discussions with good feedback :)

I think your feedback could be even more constructive, if you would not lead with an {{Oppose}} straight away but rather firstly just left a {{Comment}}. For example here you opposed to somebody who has just created their first property proposal and clearly does not yet have the experience to write a perfect proposal from the get go. I previously left a comment and they're eager to improve their proposal. I just think that not opposing straight away in general would lead to a more welcoming environment, especially since getting an {{Oppose}} for something you did not yet have the chance to address can be discouraging.

Sidenote: This is especially a problem in Wikidata property proposals since they're open for voting straight away. The OpenStreetMap proposal process on the other hand firstly has a discussion period before the proposal author can start the voting phase.

The problem comes, when people vote on proposals that shouldn't yet be in the voting phase. I'm not the person who started the voting phase in the discussion you linked to.

Unfortunately, plenty of people cast  Support votes for properties that aren't ready. That shouldn't really happen as it suggests the property is ready when it's not. Voting  Oppose is a way to prevent that property from being created when it isn't ready. I would prefer if people wouldn't create the need for that by voting  Support for proposals that don't yet deserve those votes.

I understand. I already suspected that this might be your reasoning. Nice to see that we're on the same page :)

I think we might be able to improve the status quo by changing Wikidata:Property proposal/Proposal preload to include a separate section "Voting" with some template {{Voting|open=no}} "Voting is not yet open, please discuss the property first" and an HTML comment like "change this to yes once you deem your proposal ready". Do you think that could work? Where would be the right place to discuss/suggest such changes to the Wikidata property proposal process?

A property proposal has a status in Wikidata. Currently, when the proposal gets created the field is empty. If the property proposal has support votes that field gets edited to "ready" and when a property gets created the field gets filled with the property ID. There's also the status of "withdrawn" and "not done".

Instead, of creating a new field with voting open/closed it would make sense to add a new status to the property proposal life cycle. Maybe draft/voting/ready/PXXXXX.

It's generally easy to add additional bureaucratic steps and make processes work slower as a result so it's worth thinking about whether the tradeoff is worth it here. I don't have strong opinions about that right now.

From my perspective the best place to discuss this would be Wikidata talk:WikiProject Properties and it likely makes sense to announce the discussion in the property chat and link to it from there.

Currently, I hope that Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Create_items_for_property_proposals will change our property creation process, so I wouldn't bring the topic up till that is through. After that is through, there's a good momentum to make more changes to the process.

Thanks for making me aware of that RFC! While I generally welcome structured data I don't think using data items for proposals is a good idea for the reasons I outlined in my reply on the RFC page.