2008/10/20 Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com>om>:
The point of the poll seems to be to determine what
people think of the
proposal. A poll for that purpose makes sense - lots of people have
participated in the discussion, on various subtopics and with concerns that
may or may not have been addressed.
Some people have responded as if it's a poll on what people think of
the proposal, others has responded as if it's a poll of whether or not
the proposal should be implemented right now (since that's what it
actually says), those are very different questions. The former is a
suitable question for a poll, the latter is not.
What doesn't make sense is a poll to determine the
consensus view of whether
or not consensus has been reached. You're using an exact metric to measure a
nebulous phenomena. Someone made a comparison to voting for Obama or McCain
based on who you think is most likely to win, but I think an even more apt
comparison can be made to RfA. It's like having a long discussion about an
RfA candidate (c.f. Ironholds) and then asking voters "So, did we agree in
that discussion or not?"
Indeed. If there is a true consensus then it will be completely
obvious that that is the case since there will be no-one objecting.
The problem is that we don't usually go by consensus for big policy
decisions because too many people are involved for a true consensus to
ever form (half a dozen people editing a given article can discuss an
issue, someone can implement what they think the conclusion way and
then if no-one reverts you know you have a consensus and everyone is
happy, the same does not apply to 100 people debating intricate
matters of policy). We usually go by "rough consensus" which we don't
really have a definition of, which makes determining whether it exists
or not extremely difficult.
Either way, people are clearly voting in answer to
different questions.
Folks who set up straw polls really need to be more careful.
Very true.