Do we want community polls?

Question

I have seen that TeX.SE has community polls on their meta site. Those are polls conducted on their meta to find out various things about user base. Similar polls were conducted on mathematica.SE, on academia.SE and maybe on some other SE sites I am not aware of.¹

Would it be interesting to create such a poll also here for math.SE community? The questions might be inspired by the questions from the other polls. I can imagine also some questions about:

• Demographics (e.g. users inside/outside academia, nations or at least continents, time zones, ...).
• Areas of mathematics users are interested in.
• Usage of math.SE and other sites in this network (frequency, which other SE sites, tools used to create posts or graphics used in posts...)
• Usage of various tools and mathematical software.

In fact, some questions here on meta which might be at least partially answered by such poll. A long time ago we had a question about this site usage (although the site has grown considerably since than and those answers are now clearly outdated). In this question (now deleted) somebody wondered whether mathematicians use GitHub. This recent question was about male/female ratio among users. There was also a relatively recent inquiry about polls in general.

We can learn from polls on other site about the form in which such a poll could be conducted. At the moment I am mainly interesting to know:

• Whether we want to have such polls. (Would their results be in some way useful or at least interesting?)
• Which areas could be included in the polls? (I am asking about broad areas, like the ones I have mentioned above, rather than specific questions.)
• Are there also areas which, for some reason, should be excluded?

EDIT: It seems that so far the idea was received relatively well. At the moment it is in my opinion too soon to start the thread with the community poll. (Currently quid's post has score +5, which is good, but probably not enough to call it community consensus.) I'd prefer to wait a bit to see whether there will be some other feedback or at least how the votes on the already existing answer change.

But perhaps it is not too premature to discuss some things about community polls, in case we decide to create them. But perhaps such discussion could be more suitable in chat. This is why I created this chat room. Examples of the topics which I imagine could be discussed there: various technical details, discussing whether some particular question is suitable, what experience from other sites that conducted such polls could be useful for us here, etc.

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¹ If I learn about other site which have conducted similar polls, I will add links here.

Answer 1

To me this is a rather light-hearted idea that might be useful in some ways and might be a distraction in other ways. I think we should just give this a try and see how it works out. If it becomes too much of a distraction or a source of friction without much in return we can just shut it done again. The way this is envisioned, if the linked to models should be followed, it's just one meta thread, not a big deal. It appears it does work reasonably well on tex.SE and on academia.SE, so why not here.

To be clear, technically, I assume the idea is to follow the linked to models that is there is one poll-thread, a new poll question is added as an answer-post and the answers to the poll are proposed in comments that can be voted on. (Votes on the answer-post can expressappreciation of the particular poll question; deletion of individual polls is possible too.)

Further and crucially, the idea as I understand it is not to decide something via those polls, but instead to have polls to carry out surveys. For those that do not know them I recommend to have a look at the threads on tex.SE and academia.SE questions include: What is your preferred TeX distro? What is your highest degree? On which continent do your reside? Is English your native language? And so on.

Yes, this is not exact, and yes some of it will likely be a bit on the trivial end. But, so what? It might also bring up some interesting piece of information, and those that do not like it should be able to ignore it. Finally, sometimes on main questions that could somewhat reasonably be handled in this way do come up, yet are not suitable there; it would provide a home for them.

tl;dr let's try it, if it does not work we'll just stop.

Answer 2

Personally, I'm not at all interested in having a Community Polls thread on our meta.

I feel that any "results" taken from them are not really going to be representative of the site. I note that meta participation is quite low even among high rep users so the results will likely on really say something about "active meta users", which is a fairly small group of users. (You also have issues with veracity, either in individuals being dishonest in their voting, or having a group of "outsiders" vote en masse to skew results.)

I tend to think that this will be mostly an exercise in navel gazing.

I, for one, will not participate in such a thread, either in proposing a poll or in voting for the options.

Answer 3

This "answer" isn't necessarily to advocate for one way or the other. I understand that the proposal is to create one meta thread where each "answer" is a questions and the comments to that "answer" are the options in the poll.

On the one hand I would personally be interested in seeing answers to such questions as

• the demographics (age, professional level, ...) of the users of the site,

• what software do you use (and maybe even why you use this software)?,

• what textbooks do you like and use (there could be an endless number of these)?,

• what philosophical framework do you belong to (if any)?

• what conferences do you like/have you gone to?

  As a teacher I think it might even be helpful. So personally I think some of the outcomes of these suggested polls could be interesting.

A list of things that I personally really don't care do know about

• Did you name your pet after a famous mathematician?
• Do you think about math when you go to the bathroom?

Also, I can see that this might be a way to allow certain interesting questions that currently aren't appropriate for main or meta. Is the purpose of having the polls to indirectly allow questions that we would otherwise not allow?

On the other hand, I don't know if it is entirely appropriate for the site. I really like Math Stack Exchange because of the narrow focus on providing (quality) answers to (good) questions. For me, the site is about helping people advance in their knowledge and understanding of mathematics. Having been on other forums, I think we are unique in that we haven't tried to make this into yet another social media site where anything goes. Certainly having polls doesn't create this, but I wonder if it is a step in that direction.

I also fear that having polls will just create fights in other meta threads about what type of polls are appropriate.

In the end I am leaning towards opposing the suggestion, but I also don't feel strongly about it.