Voting is currently live on my Lgbtq=* Revision tagging proposal. Yesterday a contributor voted oppose without providing a reason, after asking them if they could provide a reason on their Wiki talk page they said the following:
Oppose, they should give a reason for their proposal.
should != must. So i can or cannot give a reason. It’s my choice.
The Wiki isn’t entirely clear about this topic, it states the following:
Make sure these requirements are met during voting.
The proposal is never changed.
Monitor the validity of all votes. One person voting with multiple accounts is not allowed, asking people outside OpenStreetMap community to vote is not allowed.
People should not just vote Oppose, they should give a reason for their proposal, and/or (preferably) suggestions.
It is acceptable for author of the proposal to end the vote earlier as a rejected, so that the proposal can be re-worked.
I interpreted this as “a stated reason is a requirement for a valid oppose vote”. Though there is no clear consensus. I think this should be discussed and the Wiki should be updated to clearly state whether a reason for an oppose vote is an absolute requirement or not.
I believe it should be a requirement, when someone votes oppose there must be something that led them to that decision. There is no reason to not share that feedback as it’s a vital step in re-drafting a flawed proposal. Not making this a requirement would allow anyone to vote oppose on any proposal without having to even read it first, contributing nothing to the future of the proposal.
I’d not like to see a vote where nay sayers are in effect compelled to give a reason. After all, those supporting a vote don’t have to give a reason, why treat someone voting "no’ differently from someone voting ‘yes’? Voting no without a reason should not mean a vote is discounted.
Any forced reason may well not be true either, so could muddy the waters.
Rigorously, “must” has been used in above subsections for the 2-weeks requirements. Therefore the “should” would have to be assumed as deliberate. Other “should” used in the article is not mandatory either. Proposal process - OpenStreetMap Wiki
It might be allowed, but is indeed bad. On the other hand, the “should” could have been considering cases where users cite other’s reasons, not writing their own.
There is only one reason to vote approve, that reason being that the voter didn’t see any issues in the proposal and thus agrees with its implementation. It wouldn’t be helpful if every approve vote had to be accompanied by a “This looks great!” or “I agree with the whole proposal!”. But there’s an infinite amount of reasons to vote oppose! And I have no clue what exactly someone is concerned about when they vote oppose without providing a reason.
Additionally an oppose vote outweighs an approve vote three to one. They are thus much more impactful than approve votes because they signal that there is a flaw in the proposal, there’s no point to them if that flaw isn’t actually pointed out by the voter.
Voting can be prematurely stopped and retracted during the voting period. More often than not, it’s effectively “rejected”, difference being it’s not voted for 2 weeks.
The proposal can be back to RfC again. It doesn’t always have to be “rejected”.
I’d not ascribe any particular reason for someone’s vote except for the reason they may or may not list. Anything else is assumption or based on one’s own outlook and biases.
I think we should tolerate that some people may not want to express themselves how we might prefer. Even if that means the final result is not in our favour.
Let me put it like this: if you make a business case to change a process at your workplace, and in a meeting to discuss this, one of your colleagues goes “I disagree” and flat out refuses to elaborate. Would you take that into account when deciding whether to move forward?
Things certainly don’t work that way at my workplaces. And I don’t see why they would in OSM.
We’re not at work. We’re volunteers. Leading, managing and potential sanctioning of volunteers tends not to work so well if you apply workplace thinking to them.
A workplace analogy has its limits in a grassroots project like ours, but maybe a closer analogy would be when two mappers disagree about how to map something in the database. If you revert someone’s changeset, common courtesy says you should very briefly explain why. If you just revert or delete without explanation, it could lead to hard feelings, which isn’t good for the health of our community.
Most of the time, it’s in a downvoter’s own interest to leave an explanation anyways, because it helps influence the vote more than a mysterious downvote would. Often others will pile on with a comment like “ per spughetti”. Only when the proposal stands a snowball’s chance in hell would it make any sense to skip the comment.
This assumes of course that the voter is acting rationally in good faith. We’ve had some other votes about socially sensitive topics that people have downvoted based on considerations that have little to do with OSM or our goal of documenting ground truth. In those situations, the comments weren’t necessarily an invitation for constructive dialog either. It’s a hard problem.
A workplace analogy has its limits in a grassroots project like ours
While I share this mindset when it comes to OSM as a whole, I think we should hold the proposal process to a higher standard.
It seems that the consensus is that no, specifying a reason for an oppose vote is not an absolute requirement. I’d like to know whether you all think the Wiki should be updated to reflect this consensus, as I feel it’s currently too ambiguous and will lead to confusion (as it has already).
Specifying a reason for an oppose vote is not an absolute requirement, and the Wiki should be updated to reflect that.
Specifying a reason for an oppose vote is not an absolute requirement, and the Wiki should remain as it is.
Specifying a reason for an oppose vote is an absolute requirement.
This assumes of course that the voter is acting rationally in good faith. We’ve had some other votes about socially sensitive topics that people have downvoted based on considerations that have little to do with OSM or our goal of documenting ground truth. In those situations, the comments weren’t necessarily an invitation for constructive dialog either. It’s a hard problem.
I didn’t want to make this point initially so as to stay on topic, rest assured that this is irrelevant to the topic at hand, but I hope we can all agree that flat out refusing to state the reason for an oppose vote on an LGBTQ proposal of all things suggests bad faith in all the worst ways. I’m disappointed to see this happening in the OSM community.
Slightly more seriously, I very rarely involve myself in the wiki proposal process because I think the whole thing is a dumpster fire, but when I have voted against something it’s generally been a case of Brandolini’s law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
There have been plenty of genuinely terrible proposals over the years that just betray a fundamental lack of understanding of how OSM works. You can laboriously refute the bullshit every single time, or you can just say “not this again”, vote against, and move on. I don’t think forcing people to engage with patently ridiculous proposals is helpful or productive: I would rather see that effort put into documenting how the fundamentals of OSM tagging work.
To be clear, I haven’t looked at your proposal @spughetti and I’m sure it’s fine! But there have been plenty that aren’t.
I feel like if somebody is going to go through the effort of actually voting to oppose a proposal, they clearly know why they’re opposing but the proposal writer doesn’t - and a brief sentence/explainer really wouldn’t go amiss.
Nobody’s asking for an essay, nobody’s asking for a massive list of nitpicks either.
Oh there’s without a doubt cases like this where a detailed reason isn’t required, you could even use {{vote|wat}} in these cases. But it’s still a small effort to jot down what caused your oppose vote with roughly the same amount of effort that you feel went into the proposal, or you could refer to the reasoning another oppose voter provided.
In the case of this proposal it likely doesn’t matter as the vote ratio is currently sitting at 90% approve. But if a proposal were to be rejected because of oppose votes without any feedback the proposer wouldn’t be able to re-draft because said feedback is missing. This grinds the process to a complete halt, and I think that sets a really bad precedent.
I vehemently oppose such a statement. Assuming bad faith is (hopefully) not the way of the OSM community. And opposing a proposal is not the same as opposing the topic the proposal is about.
The proposal received an overwhelming approval. Is it really necessary to go after every single person who has a different opinion? How about a live-and-let-live approach?
Assuming bad faith is (hopefully) not the way of the OSM community. And opposing a proposal is not the same as opposing the topic the proposal is about.
This person hasn’t said they oppose the proposal rather than the topic the proposal is about. I wouldn’t assume bad faith if they have an issue with the proposal itself, but refusing to provide any reason would suggest that isn’t the case. I can’t assume that this contributor is acting in good faith when their actions have suggested the opposite.
Is it really necessary to go after every single person who has a different opinion? How about a live-and-let-live approach?
What different opinion are you referring to? And a “live-and-let-live approach”? Correct me if I’m wrong but your choice of words suggests you’re talking about the topic the proposal is about rather than the proposal itself.
(Just a disclaimer: This is off-topic from the discussion regarding whether a reason is required for oppose votes)
Oppose, they should give a reason for their proposal, and/or (preferably) suggestions.
per spughetti”. Only when the proposal stands 
