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? _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
