Re: Experiment: poll on "switching to vim-tiny for standard vi?"
On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 10:15:18PM +0100, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
> Yes, I think it's harmful to make decisions by popular vote. But just as
> that popcon exists to survey package usage, some different questions,
> technical, social or otherwise, lack any adequate form of survey on more
> people than just those who speak up on mailinglists -- after all, most
> people still only contribute to discussions if they have a new argument
> to make, at least, speaking for myself, I'll very rarely add a "Me
> too!", if I don't have anything new to say. Having a poll that doesn't
> spam the lists provides a way to "Me too!".
Well, most arguments prove themselves on merit, not popularity. It's
when they come down to elemental differences of opinion that popularity
can be a reasonable factor, but most arguments don't make it that far.
I don't think this one has--ignoring arguments posed after this poll
was posted, I don't believe there were any remaining arguments at all
for nvi.
(That's why giving a reason seemed useful in this case: with no pending
arguments for keeping nvi, if someone votes nvi regardless, I'd want to
know why; I don't place any weight in an opinion if its reason is "just
because".)
(There have been some new discussions about build deps and sizes, but
they probably need to run their course for a while longer.)
> Of course, it's very hard to make this balanced, and not skew the poll
> by providing opinionated summaries.
You can go the other way. Acknowledge that it's impossible to make the
summaries neutral, and have each summary written by someone who actually
holds that opinion. Let them be as opinionated as they want (but keep
it to a sentence or three per argument, as appropriate--complicated
cases like the GFDL may need more), and see if it balances out.
That might open the door for other issues: people making arguments that
have been soundly disproven ("vim doesn't act anything like vi!"), or
deceptive ones ("vim is several megs!"--vim-runtime is, but not
vim-tiny). So the poller would still have the task of filtering the
summaries for these. But doing that without bias is probably a lot
easier than writing unbiased summaries for an opinion a person disagrees
with.
--
Glenn Maynard
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