Editing Encyclopedia:Historical archive/Policy/Approval mechanism (section)

===ChrisG's template and process===

Copied from [[Wikipedia talk:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards]]. [[User:Maurreen|Maurreen]] 14:12, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thinking some more about Maurreen's proposal it occurred to me that with the combination of templates and categories we could set up a voting system to approve articles. Consider this template (I used subst to create the text, e.g. <nowiki> {{subst:ChrisGtest}} </nowiki>):

<div class="boilerplate" class="metadata" id="w0.1" style="background-color: #f8fcff; margin: 0 2.5%; padding: 0 10px; border: 1px solid #aaa;">
The version of this article listed below this message is a current candidate for Wikipedia 0.1. Standards for Wikipedia 0.1 are at [[Wikipedia 0.1 Standard]]. 

Voting should last for a minimum of a week, and approval requires 80% support. If opposing votes outweigh supportive votes at any stage this candidature should be removed. Full rules are listed at [[Wikipedia 0.1 procedure]]. Please vote below either for or against approval. A negative vote only counts if it provides a supporting explanation for why the article version fails to meet the standard.
[[:Category:Wikipedia 0.1 candidate {{CURRENTDAY}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}|{{PAGENAME}}]]
</div>

If you look to the bottom of the screen this template categorises the article as a candidate for Wikipedia 0.1 and also by the current day, month and year (uses variables so need to update). This means anybody wishing to vote on articles need only check the appropriate category for articles. They could click the links to the talk page of the articles they are interested in. The talk page of the article would give the link to the specific version and the votes so far; after checking the article the person could vote as they see fit.

As time passes, the articles listed as candidates will dwindle as they are approved or rejected. The fact the candidates are categorised by date would mean we know when to close the vote of any articles that have been sitting in candidate status for too long. 

Rejected articles would have the candidate category removed. Successful articles would be given a Wikipedia 0.1 category instead, again identified by the date of the version approved. In addition the specific version of the article should be listed somewhere as approved on that date, i.e [[Wikipedia: Approved 0.1/1 Dec 2004]].

I realize we don't have a consensus on how to approve articles, largely I think because some people are talking about approving top quality articles and others are talking about minimum standards for the CD/DVD editions; but this is a method which we could apply now without changes to the software, which would scale and would thus be suitable for either purpose. 
:[[User:ChrisG|ChrisG]] 01:10, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)