[Tagging] Feature Proposal - Voting - give box

Paul Allen pla16021 at gmail.com
Thu Feb 6 15:47:14 UTC 2020


On Thu, 6 Feb 2020 at 15:19, Jmapb via Tagging <tagging at openstreetmap.org>
wrote:

> The current description of "approved" on
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal_process is:
>
> > A rule of thumb for enough support is 8 unanimous approval votes or at
> least 10 votes with more than 74 % approval
>
Reading that, and that alone, abstentions count.  10 people vote yes, 5
people
vote no, and 5 people vote to abstain.  Therefore, of all the votes cast,
only
50% approve.  There are hundreds of people who could have voted, but of
those that bothered to vote, 5 abstained.  And that's the point: they
bothered to
vote in a way that was NOT "approve."  They aren't in the silent hundreds
who do not participate, they participate and they do NOT approve (which is
not the same thing as disapproval).

> The current description of "abstain" on
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template:Proposal_Page is:
> > If you don't want to vote but have comments
>
That contradicts the implications of the "74%" sentence.  And both
contradict
the technical meaning of abstention:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstention
because an abstention means that no vote is cast. In the tagging vote, what
is
referred to as an abstention is technically a spoilt vote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoilt_vote
In some jurisdictions, spoilt votes ARE counted, and it appears that in the
past
tagging votes have treated spoilt votes as if they count.

> Someone who chooses "abstain" according to this template presumably
> believes they are merely commenting, *not* voting. If they wanted their
> vote to count as the equivalent to "no," they'd vote "no"... right?
>
And if they wanted to comment but not vote they'd add their comment to the
talk page instead.  Right?

> Maybe the "abstain" option should be removed altogether. But in the
> meantime it seems irregular to tally votes according to different rules
> than those that were documented when the vote occurred.
>
Those rules are somewhat open to interpretation.  It would be good to
clarify
them, if we can agree on what they actually mean and/or what they ought
to mean (I have some doubts that we can).

-- 
Paul
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20200206/62209d70/attachment-0001.htm>


More information about the Tagging mailing list