Wikipedia:Polling is not a substitute for discussion

Decisions on Wikipedia are made by consensus, which is formed through debate. For this reason, it is preferred on Wikipedia to discuss issues rather than formally voting on them. That is not to say that voting is forbidden, but it should be used with care, and alternatives should be considered.

Problems with voting include:

1. You might miss the best solution (or the best compromise) because it wasn't one of the options in the poll.
2. By polarizing discussion and raising the stakes, the poll may contribute to a breakdown in civility and make it difficult for participants to assume good faith. A vote on a controversial issue is often extremely acrimonious.
3. Participants in a poll often expect that a majority or supermajority will automatically win the argument, or that the result will be binding - which is not the case, since Wikipedia is not a democracy. This interpretation is common even if the poll specifically says it's not binding.

Article content

The article-writing process on Wikipedia is guided by the core policies Verifiability and NPOV. These policies are nonnegotiable and not even the consensus of involved editors can permit articles to violate them. In particular, by definition one cannot vote on facts and efforts to determine the level of coverage given to minority viewpoints should be based on the undue weight clause of the NPOV policy. If a claim on an article is disputed, the burden is on the editors that wish to include that claim to provide a source for it.

For disputes which are beyond the scope of these policies, editors are expected to work towards consensus. It is often tempting to call a vote when an "impasse" seems to have been reached, but in the long term this is unlikely to resolve anything. It is generally best to work towards a compromise incorporating parts of both "sides", with mainstream issues given priority in article space over minority ones. Requests for Comment can be used to get neutral parties to comment on an issue.

Editors occasionally use polling on article talk pages to test for the existence of a consensus, or to assess community opinion on discrete issues. In these cases, polling should be used with care (if at all), and not be invoked prematurely. Note that polling cannot serve as a substitute for debate and consensus; that no poll is binding on editors who do not agree; and that polling may aggravate rather than resolve existing disputes. See also the proposal at WP:STRAW.

Deletion and featuring

Wikipedia has several processes to deal with deletion (e.g. WP:AFD) and featured content (e.g. WP:FAC). These are sometimes wrongly assumed to be majority votes. When it is noted that, for example, "AFD is not a vote", we mean that "the outcome of an AFD debate is not decided by vote counting". Indeed, these processes can be 'decided' in favor of the numerical minority, on the strength of the arguments presented.

Because the point of these processes is to form consensus, it is preferable that people discuss the matter rather than simply voting - that is, people are encouraged to explain their reasonings, respond to others and possibly compromise, rather than signing a one-word opinion and not looking back. Attempting to "vote stack" such processes are ineffective and potentially disruptive, and "votes" without reasoning may carry no weight in the final interpretation.

Policy and guidelines

Wikipedia is not a democracy; policy and guidelines are not ratified through a vote. People sometimes think that a page cannot be a guideline if it wasn't voted upon, but actually no guideline was ever enacted through a vote. Similarly, most policy was never voted upon. We have historically voted on a select few policies (WP:3RR, WP:AP, WP:SPP and the older parts of WP:CSD) but even in all of these cases, a vote was carefully put together only after discussing the matter for a month or more. In all other cases, policy was decided through discussion, or in rare cases imposed by the Board or Jimbo Wales.

The aim of guidelines is primarily to describe current practice to help editors to understand how Wikipedia works and this means that is not necessary, and in many cases unwise, to call a vote or straw poll on a proposed policy or guideline. If a proposal is not controversial, doing a headcount is not necessary; if a proposal is controversial, doing a headcount to see where the majority lies will not resolve the controversy, and may polarize it further. The controversy may spill onto the poll itself, causing debate on its mechanics. People tend to respond to ill-advised polls by voting against the poll or by adding a section for "voting is evil".

A successful proposal is made by discussion. Conflicts are best resolved by listening to objections and rewording the proposal accordingly until a compromise is reached. While straw polls can be helpful, for example in choosing between multiple possible versions of generally similar text, asking people to vote for or against a certain version of the proposal precludes compromise and is generally not helpful. A poll can never create consensus. It may show consensus, but generally consensus is already visible from discussion.

Standards

Once it has been decided by consensus to standardize an issue (e.g. template layout), it is likely there will be several suggestions for standards. Unless one of them is clearly preferred, an approval vote is recommended to select the best-liked standard. This is a way of helping to gauge which of several possible (often similar) versions has the most widespread support, so that the final version reflects consensus.

People

Whether certain people are trusted for certain functions is put to a community vote, in particular on WP:RFA and with the ArbCom election. However, in both cases the vote results are subject to interpretation by the party who makes the decision (i.e. the bureaucrats or Jimbo). There is no exact "target" percentage that forms the cutoff point. Again, in these processes it is preferable if people discuss, ask questions of the candidate, and state their reasonings, rather than simply voting "yes" or "no" with no further comment.

There are several discussions at the moment regarding how much RFA does and should resemble a majority vote.

Feature requests

Changes to the MediaWiki software are made by the developers and are usually discussed on BugZilla. Some people are tempted to call a vote on feature requests on the assumption that the more people support a feature, the more likely the developers are to implement it. However, this is not generally the case, as to the developers, issues of feasibility and server load are far more important.

Arbitration

Although arbitration is not a community process, it is listed here for the sake of completeness. The ArbCom follows a procedure of listing principles, findings of facts and remedies; individual arbiters discuss these issues and then provide either their assent or dissent. In general, findings which attract opposition are reworded to address that opposition, with the aim of reaching a consensus view among the arbitrators.

See also

• Wikipedia is not a democracy
• m:Polling is evil (The title is tongue-in-cheek.)
• Wikipedia:Voting is not evil
• Wikipedia:Straw polls