Help:Creating a vote

These are instructions for the creation of a new vote.

Instructions

1. There are five types of votes to choose from below, in this order: generic, administrator, bureaucrat, checkuser and bot. "Generic" fits most cases, including editing the text of a policy. The other 4 types are for various user privileges.
2. This is one example of a past vote: Wiktionary:Votes/2014-01/Treatment of repeating letters and syllables. The proposal was created in January 2014, hence the date, although some votes start months after their creation date.
3. To create your own generic vote, replace "Title of vote" in the appropriate box below. Choose a short title that reflects the proposal you have in mind. For user privilege votes, add the relevant username. Click the "Start" button to start a new vote.
4. This is going to open the vote in a new page, already filled with some information: the start/end date (automatically calculated by the software) and places for people to vote support/oppose/abstain.
5. There are at least 2 things you must fill by yourself: a (preferably short) description of the proposal and links to any discussions, usually from Beer parlour. Sometimes there are additional discussions in user pages worth linking. The talk page of the vote, too, is linked together with the other discussions. If necessary, you can make further changes to the vote: sometimes, one fills the page with additional "Support/Oppose/Abstain" headings to add more proposals or edits the end date to make a vote last longer.
6. Save the vote. It's going to be saved as a subpage of Wiktionary:Votes. Add the vote to Wiktionary:Votes/Active, which lists the vote in a conspicuous box in the watchlist of all users, to let them know about it. Votes are expected to start after they have already been proposed on the Beer parlour (or the Grease pit for technical matters), so use the current BP discussion to announce the existence of the vote or create a new BP discussion.
7. New votes are usually expected to linger for 7 days before actually starting. The exception are votes for user privileges: they start as soon as the relevant user accepts the nomination. The software fills the start date information automatically, so if you create a generic vote on January 10, the scheduled start date is going to be January 17. Feel free to work on the wording of your vote in the meantime; others might help by editing the vote, too. Some votes take longer to start, as mentioned above. If that is the case of your vote, edit the start date and also the end date once it actually starts, to make up for the delay. It is customary to place your vote (typically a support vote) once you start the vote.

See also

• Wiktionary:Votes
• Wiktionary:Voting policy