Untagging since Herald tagged us.

This may be superseded by work on T289388: Create a drag-drop solution for ranked choice voting which already disallows ties. But I think STV works in quite a different way to other ranked methods so perhaps not.

I think this is a bad idea. And the description here seems quite different than the wishlist item.

First, the link to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2015/Reading#Make_quality.2Freliability_of_an_article_more_clear_to_the_reader seems unrelated to this.

Instead I guess this is the relevant item: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2015/Miscellaneous#Make_SecurePoll_feature-rich

That 2015 wishlist item proposes more flexibility, and asks for many voting methods, including STV which was not yet available in SecurePoll.
That was achieved a few years ago.

I see no reference in the wishlist discussion to tie votes.

Note that the 2019 ASBS election of affiliate-selected wikimedia foundation board of trustees allowed for equal rankings, and the variant of STV that was used to tabulate those votes worked fine, IIRC.

The notion that it would now be good to restrict the ways voters can rank candidates and disallow ties is contrary to the notion of allowing more flexibility.

There are voting methods which allow and even encourage equal rankings, so if this restriction was added, they would no longer be supported in the way the wishlist item was framed (via an external tabulator).

It would indeed be trickier to allow a convenient drag-and-drop UI which also allowed for equal rankings, but that is a separate issue.