- From: François REMY <fremycompany_pub@yahoo.fr>
- Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2012 21:52:44 +0200
- To: "Sebastian Zartner" <sebastianzartner@gmail.com>
- Cc: "Kang-Hao \(Kenny\) Lu" <kanghaol@oupeng.com>, "Brian Kardell" <bkardell@gmail.com>, <www-style@w3.org>
| Of course polls can't be used as decision-making tools when they don't | reach a representative amount of people. And to reach a representative | amount of people you'll have to share the link via different (neutral) | sources and let it run for some time. No matter how much people you can reach, if the global shape of the surveyed group, the bias of the method you are using to reach this group and the reasons of respondents engagement in the poll can't be determined correctly, this is completely vain. I remember clearly having seen at high school the Literary Digest vs George Gallup case. "In 1936, his new organization achieved national recognition by correctly predicting, from the replies of only 50,000 respondents, that Franklin Roosevelt would defeat Alf Landon in the U.S. Presidential election. This was in direct contradiction to the widely respected Literary Digest magazine whose poll based on over 2,000,000 returned questionnaires predicted that Landon would be the winner." [1] I'm a strong believer in user surveying, but I believe we don't have adequate tools at this time to make a poll really useful. | So the mailing list obviously can't be used to reach | enough people to make a decision. I agree with you. There are options to fix this, and I'm going to consider them carefully. _______________________________________ [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gallup
Received on Sunday, 9 September 2012 19:53:14 UTC