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How can we poll a community?
In my effort of giving structure to EE.CD tags pages, I find myself in the need of asking the community for consensus about some debatable choices.
Of course the place for this is EE Meta, but I'd like to know in general if there is a standard practice to poll the community.
In other words, suppose I want to ask the community if it is OK to do something out of a list of actions (multiple choice of actions), how to do that in an effective way?
If I list all the choices in the question it is impossible to know why the question was upvoted or downvoted. I could read comments and possible answers, but this has proven to be messy and lengthy for a simple multiple choice which doesn't need too much discussion.
I thought about the following process:
- Post the issue in a question, with general premises.
- Post an answer for each choice, telling the community in the question to upvote/downvote one (or more) of the answers to "vote" on the choice to undertake.
- Wait some time before taking action. The "expiry date" of the poll should be advertised in the question.
Crude example
Question
I think the tag cruncher is too ambiguous. I have three choices for the community. How should I proceed?
The three choices are spelled out in the answers below. Please express your vote by upvoting/downvoting those answers. The poll expires in 4 days. I will take steps to enact the community decision after that date.
Answer 1
Ask the devs to delete the tag and add it to a blacklist.
Answer 2
Create two new tags potato-cruncher and cookie-cruncher,
add cruncher as a synonym to potato-cruncher.
Answer 3
Create two new tags potato-cruncher and cookie-cruncher,
add cruncher as a synonym to cookie-cruncher.
Is this a sensible approach? Any alternative?
2 answers
The approach of one answer per option has another benefit: someone might think of something else, or propose a refinement of an existing option. I recommend that approach -- describe the problem in the question, describe possible solutions in answers (one per answer), invite other answers if applicable, and ask people to vote.
If you feel a particular Meta question requires more visibility than it's getting, you can ask moderators to feature the question to add it to the top of the sidebar column (the right column in the desktop layout).
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One answer per choice works pretty well. Check out how we rolled out proposals for scope at Software Development: https://software.codidact.com/posts/278648
There we went by voting, consensus can be said to be reached when the majority agrees, although if there's close to 50/50 that's probably not to be regarded as consensus. Then a moderator went ahead and pasted it all together here: https://software.codidact.com/help/on-topic
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