Quote:
Originally Posted by Orius  Also, there's only 904 total votes while ENWorld has over 74,000 members, so that's only a small fraction of forum members (addmittedly many of those 74,000 are probably inactive). |
I've been saying this a lot lately -- The overall population number is completely irrelevant to the accuracy of any poll (internet or not, self-selected or not). If the poll fails to be representative, it has nothing to do with the size of the fraction polled.
Statistical sampling theory in fact goes and assumes that you've got an
infinite sized population, because it totally doesn't matter what that number is, and the math is simpler that way. It's when the fraction polled gets too
big (over 5%) that you have to do an a bit more calculation to account for it. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_...opulation_size
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