# Opinion polls on TeX.SE?

Some questions need authoritative answer (and we like them in SE). Some others ask for alternatives and cannot be definitively answered (and we have big-list tag for them).

There is a third kind of possible questions: tendency survey. These questions ask for a tendency or for the opinion of the community on a specific point. This third kind of questions is not accepted today on TeX.SE (even if lots of questions masked as authoritative ones are, in fact, of this kind).

In my opinion, to know tendencies of TeX community is quite important: if I am interested by `LuaLaTeX` for example, I would like to know how many people use it. If I started using `LaTeX` for bibliography, I would like to know what system is the most popular between `BibTeX`, `BibLaTeX`, `natbib`, ... This information is epistemologically relevant. Knowing it avoids me to choose an outdated solution for which it will be difficult to obtain help.

You could think we have the, previously mentioned, big-list tag for opinion surveys. Indeed, this tag is used for these questions sometimes. For example : LaTeX Editors/IDEs. Let's study this example furthermore: when you read this topic, you believe to know that Emacs+Auctex is the more popular LaTeX editor. In fact, you can't know that for sure:

1. Perhaps, there are anti-x (where x is an editor) who have voted down it (and it's the case in our example). So the results are false.
2. Perhaps a solution (editor in our example) is the first but there are plenty of alternatives and it is, in fact, a very low percent of the community which is it. It is very different when 90% of the community used a tool and when 20% used another tool.

To sum up, there is no way in TeX.SE to handle in a proper way opinion polls. If we recognized there are important to decide what software used, we should find a way to treat them with statistics and correct polling methods.

P-S: The first solution to a problem is to use the correct tool to achieve our specific purpose.