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all the "lists of xyz", "hidden feature of abc" etc .. should be marked community wiki instantly. i am somewhat under the impression that the term "poll" would fit better :) i mean, almost all "cw"s i ve seen so far are mostly "polls" which use the votes to rank the item higher or lower.

is there any obvious separation between "poll" and "cw"? would "poll" be another "type" for a question? do we want "polls" at all?

(maybe this question fits better on meta.stackoverflow.com as the master-meta-page, don't know)

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No, you have your cause and effect backwards... sort of. For a quick background:

Those "list of X" questions: people ask them but they're not really what we want in a Q&A system. They tend to be polls and copy-pasted content, not original contributions. Everyone agrees that there shouldn't be a deluge of them on the system, but the author of each one of those questions thinks somehow that theirs is the useful exception. So they proliferate as the "low-hanging fruit" in the system.

Until a community steps forward and decides they are off-topic entirely, we reluctantly try to accommodate — I should say tolerate — them in small quantities. To mitigate the large reputation gained from relatively little contribution in content, we ask that "list of X" (i.e. poll-style) questions be made community wiki from the outset.

Community wiki has the side effect of not rewarding reputation for votes received, but using wiki for that purpose alone was never its intended purpose.

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    the intention was good, but in reality we see lots of "polls". even if we do not want them, people seem to like them. to ban them is maybe a bit too harsh (reminds me of the wikipedia-delete-debate, where "old" folks remove lots of stuff they think is not appropriate) .. i mean, lets mark the polls polls, let them be, if people do not want to see it, just let them ignore these tags. or, another approach, what about creating just a pseudo q&a for ALL the polls?
    – akira
    Commented Jul 3, 2010 at 8:25
  • yah, i see now what you mean "cause - effect" wise. so maybe i should rephrase the question to something like "should there be either category OR a permanent tag 'poll'" instead of "cw".
    – akira
    Commented Jul 3, 2010 at 8:35
  • Thank you for that. People still use cw as "let's skirt the rules" however. Example: webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/2050/… Maybe a "discussion" option separate from cw that then cordons the question off from the main feeds of "new" and "hot" questions and so on. I don't know, but something.
    – Matt Blaine
    Commented Jul 8, 2010 at 20:27
  • Please see my question here.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Jul 10, 2010 at 20:29
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No.

Poll is not a category of question we want.

Poll implies the "answers" are one word or one item; what we want is answers that explain how or why, or relate someone's specific experiences.

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  • correct, thats something we do not want. but at the very moment a lot of such "cw" marked "answers" are just that, polls. so, should these be marked explicitly marked / tagged as polls?
    – akira
    Commented Jul 3, 2010 at 8:21

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