Charm School (TV series)

I'll start this one off, then. The intent of the experiment was to allow issues to be dealt with before the "voting", as a common experience is 1) someone posts diffs as an oppose reason 2) Pileon of "Per X" by users who may or may not return for any explanation 3) explanations met with "oppose per badgering" comments. An additional advantage to this type of RfA is that it allowed the readers/commenters to get a much greater insight into the candidate than the standard system. The new system failed to prevent issues cropping up during the voting stage, leading to the normal result, which is fair enough as users are perfectly entitled to post reasoning in the voting stage. The system did allow greater insight into the candidate, but many felt that the question period was too long, and that there were too many questions.

The solution to the second one is simple; I propose that the question period for the next experimental RfA (going up, say, a week from now) be set to 2 or 3 days rather than the original 4. 2 would probably be better, but 3 allows for any latecomers. A suggestion brought up at the London wikimeet was to have a 'crat clerk the page, removing inappropriate questions (repeated ones, for example); I'd be interested in hearing people's responses to this. I feel that in future questions should be more tailored towards the candidate rather than general, far-ranging ones; this would help keep the numbers down and also make the questions more useful.

The first problem is a tricky one. One idea would be to allow simple "oppose" "support" and "neutral" with no "because..." to encourage people to bring up their issues through questions rather than "vote" comments. Issues with this are fairly obvious; firstly, it furthers the idea that RfA is a vote, which it is not, second it makes it impossible for a closing 'crat to rule out silly reasons and third it makes it almost impossible for failed candidates to gain insight into their faults, as it were. Possibly a system were comments are visible to the crat but not to other users? This would probably require MediaWiki messing, however, and again has issues.

I'd like to thank the people who've participated in this RfA and will hopefully take part in the post-mortem. I'm creating a section now for people who want to scrap the whole thing, and another for people who believe it would work with changes (please specify what if commenting); hopefully other headings will turn up as needed. Ironholds (talk) 12:37, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Would work, but with changes

• Well, kudos to you for trying. As for the future... I think maybe what would help (47 questions is probably a bit much) is not only to shorten the time period, but to limit the number of questions. I figure the questions come in three basic flavours:

1. Standard questions - we've already got this
2. Policy questions - hypotheticals, trying to gauge candidate understanding of policy
3. Candidate-specific questions - e.g., "In this situation, you did this. Why?"

So how do we limit the second two categories? That's tough to say, but maybe there's a time limit on that, too. Maybe the process should look like:

1. Candidate announces they are RfA in the usual way
2. Discussion page opens for three days to hash out the questions that need to be asked, say, 10 in each category. The candidate does not reply to these questions. Maybe--I don't even know if this is possible?--the candidate is unable to view the discussion page at this point. Candidate can respond to the standard questions as per usual.
3. Questions transcluded to main RfA page, candidate may respond for three days. Each commenter gets to ask one followup question if they feel clarification is needed. Maybe to a maximum of x followup questions per each question.
4. Voting opened after three days. But--again, I really don't know if this is possible--votes are hidden to everyone except crats until the end of the voting period. This allows for early closes per SNOW and NOTNOW.
5. Votes displayed after voting closes.

My reasoning for the hiding is this: pileons happen both for and against. It might make more sense for each person voting to vote strictly according to what they see in the responses. I don't know. As for hashing out the questions for a couple of days beforehand, this allows people to distill what they see as any potential issues with the candidate before questioning opens. Plus, at least in terms of policy questions, this could end up showing that there are x questions that everyone always asks, so we should make them part of the standard set. Just some thoughts. [ roux ] [x] was prince of canada 12:59, 13 October 2008 (UTC)