InstaGov/SMW

About

Instead of having separate tables for questions and answers, each question or answer could be a wiki page with SMW data. No edit logging would be necessary, as that will be handled automatically by the wiki's edit-logging features.

• Advantages:
  • easier to set up (no database mods needed)
  • no special software needed for basic functionality (especially if only trusted users have edit access)
  • ability to leverage SMW features for analysis and reporting.
• Disadvantages:
  • platform-dependent (need MW and SMW)
  • may be difficult to prevent voter fraud
  • probably more CPU-intensive

Page Types

In each case, the remainder of the page (and the talk page) could be used for longer exposition and discussion that doesn't fit within the voting system's formal structure.

Questions

This corresponds to the question table.

• Summary would be a short summary of the given question, suitable for displaying in lists.
• Details would be a longer explanation, possibly for printing in reports

Answers

This corresponds to the answer table.

• Summary would be a short summary of the given answer, suitable for displaying in lists.
• Details would be a longer explanation, possibly for printing in reports

Ratings

This is the tricky part. We need to tie together three things: a user, an answer, and the user's rating for that answer. SMW also lets us tie together three things (a page, a property name, and a property value) -- but how do we reliably map one to the other?

A solution:

• Any rating within a user's space means that the user has made that rating.
• The property name is the answer's page name.
• The property value is the user's rating (presumably -10 to +10 or similar).

The main issue here is that other users could edit a given user's vote. We will need to prevent or monitor this. We will also need to do something about out-of-range votes and invalid vote values.