Voting guidelines?

Question

Are there any voting guidelines? I haven't found any in the FAQ.

Background is this question, downvote and comment by "user unknown". Basically it appears as if he downvoted my answer because he doesn't like the word "nachverfolgen" out of principle, implying there are no "intelligent" sentences to be formed with that word, and that "verfolgen" was a perfect substitute for all instances of "nachverfolgen".

My point, which he didn't answer yet, is that as long as a word is recognized as a proper German word, which a simple Duden/Google search confirms (my LMGTFY-reflexes are itching mightily here), he should not downvote my answer based on his mere dislike of that word. The word in question has been used by the user posting the question, and that user merely cited another person.

So what I'm saying is: Votes should be given according to the correctness and usefulness of the answer, not some purely personal like/dislike of the example sentence.

Is that correct or not?

Answer 1

Regarding your first question: The privilege descriptions say something:

• https://german.stackexchange.com/privileges/vote-up
• https://german.stackexchange.com/privileges/vote-down

And there are the tooltips of course...

Regarding your second question: I think you're right. I think downvotes should be used very sparingly. Promotion is better than demotion. Downvotes imo should be reserved for cases that are clearly wrong and misleading and can not be rectified by comments. So yeah, ultimately I think the downvote to your answer is not deserved.

On the other hand I stopped worrying about by my definition undeserved downvotes. In most instances where I received downvotes here I either don't think they are deserved or they haven't been taken back after I corrected the issue. But when you have a downvote out of a couple of upvotes it just isn't worth to think about it too much. We have all better things to do with our time. Someone always disagrees.

Answer 2

There is only one effective voting guideline and it is already established:

"How to vote is the decision of the voter."

Everything else is just useless. You cannot prove the intention of a vote. You can argue about correctness to no end. How do you want to force someone to not downvote (or upvote) if you think (or whoever) that it is undeserved? You can't, so just leave it.

Answer 3

I think the comments to both answers yours and Urs Reupke's imposingly show the enormous range of different meanings to - imho - even simple and clear issues.

Since there is a broad range you'll ever get some more or less unjustified votes, but in both direction. Lots of questions and answer have many upvotes and I really don't know what for the upvotes are made.

A voting guideline? Well, that'll hard to force through. But comparing with other SE site you'll see that we already have a user-friendly voting system on GLU, hence we have no reason to chance.

Well, if you want to have a helping hand, I would say:

• Reserve upvotes for really good questions/answer. That is:
  • The question is clear, there is no doubt in the intention of the question.
  • The user made a research and it is reasonable that he couldn't find any satisfying answer.
  • An answer is thoroughly correct. Online links are often helpful ;)
    Side note: Personal thoughts, likely based on e.g. region dialects, should be clearly marked as notes.
• Reserve downvotes for really bad questions/answer. That is:
  • The intention of the question is not clear. You're not able to improve the question.
  • You can give an answer, since there is a qualified result on page one on Google.
  • An answer is just wrong. None of the conjectures are reasonable or verifiable.

Answer 4

LMGTFY is on my side, too. To cite some aged discussions from general meta, here is a consideration to use downvotes to make an upvote on another answer shine alight by (attention! argumentam ad autoritatem) Jon Skeets answer to: Encouraging people to explain down-votes and the answer of shog9 .

Related: Downvoting penalty and costs: Should the weight of downvotes be increased? and here: Why do you cast downvotes on answers?

Am I downvoting too much, or are things really that bad?

Of course I present a slightly biased subset of discussions and answers, but you know you're free to read the other answers as well and search yourself for more discussions on that topic.