User:Rock drum/Election pages setup

I've put this page together to document how the 2012 AGM election pages I made worked together in case the same setup needs to be used again in the future.

Level 1 (elections homepage)

The elections all worked as subpages of the 2012 AGM event page. This isn't necessary, it just sort of made sense. This page listed all the candidates and had a link to their sections on the statement and questions pages (but more on that a little further down). There was also space for what the candidates were also known as. This mostly turned out to be Wikimedia usernames but could also be used for nicknames of non-editor candidates.

Level 2 (statements)

Since this page would only be edited by tellers, the actual content on the page didn't have to be made particularly easy to edit. The statements were just sorted into sections (one for each candidate) and the page was protected.

Level 2 (questions)

This page, too, was unlikely to be edited by many people so its complexity was unimportant. An <inputbox> was used to facilitate the asking of questions to individual candidates and general questions were to be listed on WikiConference UK 2012/Elections/Questions/Questions. Answers were displayed further down using the template {{WikiCon12/Candidate questions}}. This is not a template that needs recreating each year as it isn't year-specific. A future year's could be redirected to this or the template moved to a more generic title.

Level 3 (questions)

Now, the questions pages required more thought; since a significant number of the board candidates weren't editors and wouldn't be accustomed to editing wikis, I wanted the places that they would be answering the questions to be as "un-daunting" as possible. This manifested itself as the answers pages being separate subpages (eg. WikiConference_UK_2012/Elections/Questions/John_Smith, for a candidate named "John Smith"). Anyone that wanted to ask questions of candidates could do so on a separate page (WikiConference_UK_2012/Elections/Questions/Questions). The list of questions and instructions for how to answer them was then displayed as an edit notice for each page (eg. MediaWiki:Editnotice-0-WikiConference_UK_2012-Elections-Questions-John_Smith). At the top of the candidate's answers page was a template telling them where the edit button was (we really didn't know how "wiki-literate" - or not - the candidates would be).

Then came the problem of questions for individual candidates, rather than for all of the candidates. Chapter members were encouraged to ask questions to a single candidate on the talk page of that candidate's answer page (eg. Talk:WikiConference_UK_2012/Elections/Questions/John_Smith).