[WikiEN-l] Voting and "!voting", what's the difference?

[Ray Saintonge]

>
> Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:39:40 +0100
> From: Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Voting and "!voting", what's the difference?
>
> Shortly after I thought we'd finally killed off the habit of excessive
> polling, an apologetic, humorous and evidently quite common meme
> appeared on Wikipedia: the "!vote".
>
> Unlike the "vote", the "!vote" seems to afford the author the latitude
> to falsely claim that he is opposed to polls and is not in fact
> engaged in a polling exercise.
>
> In short, a "!vote" is simply a way of recasting polls so as to avoid
> calling them polls.  "!Polls?"
>
> The reason we avoid polls?  Because they lead to vote-counting
> (counting "!votes" is the same thing even if we're supposed to pretend
> that a "!vote! is not the same as a vote).  Because they lead to
> taking sides.  Because they destroy efforts at compromise.  Because in
> the worst case they encourage people to create a separate section for
> people who agree with one another to congregate their comments, where
> there is no danger of their comments being mistaken for attempts to
> reach consensus by discussion.
>
> I'm seeing ban discussions on [[WP:AN]] being turned into polls, and
> attempts to undo this are resisted by people who apparently believe
> they're following Wikipedia policy.
>
> It's 2009. Why is this happening?
>
>   
It's happening as a by-product of the human need for certainty, even 
when certainty is impossible.  Many people are really not ever 
comfortable without clear and precise guidelines about what to do, and 
do not accept any answer that would require them to exercise imagination 
or innovation. It's more comfortable for them to adapt the data to fit 
the rules than to adapt the rules to fit the data. Votes do indeed force 
people to take sides when the best solution is really somewhere between 
the two proposed extremes.  A person who feels overwhelmed by the amount 
of "corrections" he feels obliged to make will see his time spent more 
productively when he can make

In theory, I would expect that "votes" would be more formal than 
"polls".  What some regard as "informal straw polls" to give a rough 
idea about where the discussion is going, the more insecure among us 
will take even a marginal one-voice victory as proof that the matter has 
been decided and that we can now move on to another topic.  If we 
introduce "!vote" or "!poll" as some kind of new idea we do no better 
than a dog chasing his own tail.


Ec