Help - Polls

You can add simple polls to your wiki using a simple syntax.

How do I add poll to a page?
To add a poll, enter the following code:

Title of poll Choice 1 Choice 2 etc.

For example:

What is your favourite color? Red Green Blue Other

Which will result in this:

What is your favourite color? Red Green Blue Other

How does it work?
Votes are registered under either your username or, if you're not logged in, your IP address. This means that it is easy to manipulate the results, and the poll feature should not be used for important purposes.

Users can change their vote at any time.

The poll will display the number and percentage of votes for each choice, the total number of votes given so far, and the date and time when the poll was created.

Can the votes be reset?
It is not possible to end, i.e. to 'freeze', a poll. All polls last indefinitely.

To reset all votes, change either the title or one of the poll's choices (which will, in effect, create a new poll).

Because it's so easy to change and reset polls, past poll results can easily be lost. Reverting to the version prior to the reset may allow you to reclaim the information, but you should not rely on this functionality. If historical polls are important to you, it is safest to record the results in some other form of wikitext, either one time or at intervals.

Customization options
It is possible to customize the design of the poll extension via CSS.

Changing the width of the poll
Polls are 40em wide by default. Wiki admins can make the poll widths changeable by adding:

div.ajax-poll { width:auto !important; }

to MediaWiki:common.css on your wiki.

This will make all polls on your wiki be as wide as the "box" they're in, i.e. they'll usually expand to be as wide as the article body. You can now set its width by wrapping it in a div with a set width, or a table cell, or in any other layout box. Example:

How wide is this poll? Wide Not so wide