How should we handle meta questions that ask for a yes/no answer that potentially affect the whole tex.se community and set a threshold on the number of positive (or negative) votes for a clear "yes" (or a clear "no") within a particular time frame? An example of such a question could strive to change some modalities of the moderator elections or change some parts of the code of conduct, for instance. Clearly, such changes might affect the way tex.se works in the long run, so they better be well-thought, unhasted, and enjoy a possibly vast consensus. (After all, we have good moderators now, who kick the nasty inhabitants only, and we do want to keep it that way rather than get mean bastards-of-hell moderators who kick everyone or noone, as is often seen accross the Web.) To ensure the consensus and protect the community, it is better that the community decides on this matter rather than the individual who posts a particular meta question. This applies both to the decisions that have to go to the powers in the end (to be agreed upon and, if necessary, implemented there) as well as to the decisions that don't need to go to the powers: we need acceptance in our community first.

Should we try to interpret the aforementioned votes in some way at all? If the question is edited (except improving on typos) during voting, should we declare the votes as non-binding or even nullify them? Or should this ruling prohibit edits due to typos to be strictly fair? If we interpret the votes, which values would make sense? After all, some values are likely to be meaningless. For example, 30000 votes is likely to be unreachable, though we have 138855 tex.se users as of 22:54 UTC on 2019-04-01, and 30 votes would represent only a infinitesimally tiny portion of the tex.se population.

(Just to start with, concerning the threshold, one could have a formula such as a*(number of views) + b*(all number of tex.se users) + c*(number of active tex.se users) + d*(number of active meta.tex users) for the threshold, where a, b>c>d are certain constants strictly between 0 and 1 that are to be found out. The definition of the term "active" has yet to be clarified, too; opinions on both are welcome. As for the time frame, this should probably correlate with the vote count: the longer period of time we grant, the more votes we should ask for; one could think of a surplus of at least some 10 votes per day on average, for instance. Similarly, if the question is [featured], it gets more attention by being linked from the meta main page, so, more votes should be asked for such questions.

In any case, the above suggestion is a parenthetical one; to enable some discusion, I intentionally neither make the formula or the timeframe precise here nor make it precise on how we will decide on this.)

Or should we better ignore such thresholds (whoever the author may be) or the whole questions altogether and consider the contents of the questions only as starting points for discussions?

Opinion answers are welcome on what the policy should be.