I recently asked a poll question on SO. (Exhibit A: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1109880/what-do-you-call-the-punctuation-marks-and-closed)

The question was created as community wiki, seemed (to me) reasonably concise and unlikely to spark controversy, and was at least peripherally programming-related. I seeded it with a few very brief answers, hoping that would encourage others to do the same. (I'm a relative newbie. I may have failed to establish it as a poll at first; hopefully a couple of edits fixed that.)

In SO FAQ terms, I felt that it

• was not a duplicate
• was detailed and specific
• was written clearly and simply
• was of interest to at least one other programmer somewhere
• was most certainly subjective
• was not argumentative
• did not require extended discussion

It was closed fairly quickly as "subjective and argumentative". I'm not arguing that it should have been left open, nor am I petitioning that it be re-opened. If the community believes that a question is not interesting or useful, then it ought to be closed.

The question was a sincere one, but it was also an experiment--I wanted to learn more about how the community handles polls. I'm afraid I still don't fully appreciate the social mores that govern SO polling. It seems that nearly all of the most popular questions are polls or call for highly subjective discussion. (Take a look at the "hottest questions this month"...) There would appear to be right and wrong ways of conducting polls--I'd like to hear from some SO natives.

Thanks for your thoughts.

P.S. Despite my own involvement with this question, I have little interest in seeing SO become a poll- and opinion-based site. I believe that SO's main strength lies in its ability to distill the experience of its many users into clear, concrete solutions to real problems.