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List management is a tremendous pain in all wikis, the worst of manual tasks.
It's useful to distinguish between three types of lists:
- those in strong order and explicitly numbered as a sequence of steps that all users are expected to agree on
- those in a strong but undecided, or proposed priority order that is subject to debate among all users, such as a list of candidates for a position that is being voted upon, in which case there may be a specific protocol for changing the order that isn't the same as the protocol for challenging a sequence, i.e. consensus isn't expected
- those in a very weak order or unordered state which can, like the strong order, be edited directly because it's amenable to debate and isn't making any decision
The use of proposed priority order is very common in wikis especially for votes. As there are many ways to undermine a vote it would be useful at least to allow for a list style that automatically re-ordered or tally items based on, for instance, some ranking or vote system that acts as a plugin. No need to use new characters, an overload could do, something like #* to mean "present these in the order that the group agrees on by voting" and *# to mean "keep these in the order defined but indicate the tally of votes for each one beside the option" or something like that. This lets a page describing a decison or election be locked while users vote. Even if all users can edit, anyone changing that structure is not going to mess up the presentation of the vote. Changing the option(s) would for instance invalidate the vote unless/until it was restored to a previous state. Variants like ##* could support preference or allocation votes.