Wiktionary talk:Votes/2021-09/Sore-loser rule

Effect on previous votes

@Victar: If one of the options in this vote passes, would you take action against Wiktionary:Votes/2021-08/Nullifying the previous templates vote also, despite it being created and finished before this one? —Svārtava² • 16:07, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

@Svartava2: This vote’s ‘a moratorium on the creation of re-votes and vote reversals […] ’. Hence, the nullification vote, having been created before (as well having begun earlier than) this vote, would in no wise be affected by it. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 10:54, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

The name "sore-loser rule"

The name "sore-loser rule" seems unnecessarily harsh, and seems to focus on the wrong thing (an attitude toward the person wishing to start such a vote, rather than the consequences of conducting the vote). —Ruakh_TALK 07:17, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Came here to say this. Equinox ◑ 21:26, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Administrator nominations

Not all votes are equivalent. Even if we decide that policy votes shouldn't be re-raised for a full year, we probably wouldn't want a premature administrator nomination to then mean that the nominee can't be re-nominated for a full year. —Ruakh_TALK 07:17, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

@AG202 also raised that and it's a good point. Sysop votes should probably be excluded. --{{victar|talk}} 17:06, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Votes that didn't reach consensus

The comments quoted on this vote page are in part specific to passing votes (Benwing2's comment specifically restricts itself to "passing votes"; DCDuring's speaks of "votes to nullify previous votes", a concept which can only apply to passing votes), but their arguments actually apply as well to votes that did not pass — especially DCDuring's argument: "Should we just keep on having votes until your side wins one? Should we then stop or should we then allow more votes?"

Furthermore, if I understand correctly, Victar's main interest with this vote is to apply it to a certain failed vote — a vote that achieved only 65.5% support, and therefore failed for lack of consensus, which Victar seems to take to mean that the 34.5% minority position should be enforced instead? (I know that doesn't make sense, but I'm not sure how else to interpret his/her comment atop User talk:Victar#Imetsia's block, which explicitly refers to "the ruling of" that failed vote. (S)he has also made various other comments along similar lines. If I've misunderstood, and someone can explain this in a way that does make sense, I'm all ears!)

So, I think we need to resolve that question before proceeding with this vote, else this can only create even more confusion and frustration.

—Ruakh_TALK 07:17, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Subjectivity

In practice, I think that this policy would often be rather subjective. Suppose that a vote passes to include a certain language as an appendix-only language. Would it then be forbidden to put forth a vote, n months later, to actually allow it in mainspace? One person might argue that the second vote would strengthen the outcome of the first — the first allows it in Wiktionary, the second would grant it full/equal footing — while another person might argue that the second vote would repeal part of the outcome of the first. That's not necessarily a dealbreaker — our policies aren't always objective, and we can always have discussions — but I think it's worth thinking through first? —Ruakh_TALK 07:17, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Don't such votes fail anyway?

Even without this policy, we see that people sometimes vote against a proposal not because they disagree with the substance, but because they feel that the vote is inappropriate in one way or another. (See, for example, some of the "oppose" comments at Wiktionary:Votes/2021-08/Nullifying the previous templates vote. Admittedly, that's a bit of a weird example because that vote is to "nullify" a vote that ended in "no consensus", so it's not really clear what it would mean to nullify it; but regardless, the oppose-voters aren't expressing confusion, they're expressing an objection to the vote itself, and they're doing so by voting against it.)

I do think we should discourage instant re-votes in advance (rather than just by voting them down); but maybe the best way to do that is with an informative note at Wiktionary:Voting policy that such attempted re-votes tend to get voted down because they're seen as disruptive?

—Ruakh_TALK 07:17, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Has this vote been created in good faith?

I have my misgivings for the following reasons:

• This vote seeks to set the bar on how sooner a revote or vote reversal may occur. Such a measure is unnecessary at best, because in the history of this project, revotes or vote reversals have hardly happened in a presumptively indecent haste. The wynn restoration vote was created because the editor (User:Birdofadozentides) who had spent a lot of time creating wynn entries, was not informed of the discussions and the subsequent vote that led to the deletion of wynn entries; therefore they had a reasonable cause to create the vote in question. While, User:Imetsia created the nullification vote only because all discussions had failed, and Victar was going on removing any instances of inh+/bor+ and thereby begriming our pristine page histories; thus it is much understandable that Imetsia’s vote seeks to end the neverending dispute regarding the existence & usage of the new templates, once and for all. Therefore, any moratorium should be unnatural for such exceptional cases.
• Victar has blatantly created their vote as a reaction to the one created by Imetsia. They have even set the vote for a duration of 2 weeks so that it ends before the nullification vote. In some way, this vote itself seems to a sort of sly circumvention, and indeed smacks of ill gesture on the part of the vote’s creator.
• User:Ruakh has explained more flaws of this vote in general. Thus, for all the reasons, I call upon any sysop to delete this vote. Community consensus is more important than creating votes; Victar’s yet to prove how they have created their vote in goodwill (as against the aforesaid vote reversals created in good faith and/or for a valid reason).

·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 12:57, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

For all the talk about how divisive and unnecessary the nullification effort is, none of the opponents of that vote have anything to say about a thinly-veiled attempt to frustrate Wiktionary governance. Strange.

And Ruakh merely began to outline the problems with this "sore-loser rule." I'll give fuller thoughts when I actually vote against, but in summary: (1) its terms are vague and invite uneven enforcement; (2) we already have the tools to end excessive re-litigation and we've applied them successfully in the past; (3) there are many ways to circumvent a sore-loser rule; (4) this is yet another backdoor way to try to overturn prior consensus regarding the templates. All this on top of the obvious defects Ruakh outlined above.

Imetsia (talk) 15:36, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Re: "I'll give fuller thoughts when I actually vote against": Please don't do that. If you have reasons that could convince people to vote against a proposal, you should give those reasons beforehand, firstly so that the proposal can potentially be changed to address them, and secondly so that voters can hear those reasons before voting. Conversely, if you have reasons that you know would not convince anyone else, then you might as well keep them to yourself, rather than arguing for the sake of arguing. —Ruakh_TALK 21:25, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

OK then. I had this saved up in a Word doc so I could copy-and-paste it on Sep 8 (and I'll probably paste it again when I cast my vote), but here it is now:

This proposal purports simply to prevent persistent efforts to undo a past decision too soon after its holding has been established. If that were all, I would support it. But the "sore-loser rule" promises to be used much more amply and with much more sinister purpose. For that reason, I must vote against it.

First, the sore-loser rule is open to a great deal of interpretation and invites discriminatory enforcement. Because its terms are so poorly defined, individual administrators will have to make their best guess of what constitutes a "re-vote" or "vote reversal." This might seem like a simple task, but practice has shown that this standard is unworkable. For example, Victar’s whole claim for the necessity of creating Wiktionary:Votes/2021-04/Creation of Template:inh+ and Template:bor+ was that it was "essentially a rollback of the vote that removed the lead text from the template." Some other users have signed on to this argument, but a great many contributors disagree. Try as Victar has to demonstrate the rigidity of his line of reasoning, the notion that the templates’ creation required a vote can barely withstand a gentle breeze. But even if we accept that the issue is a tossup, Victar has not advanced an idea of how to break the stalemate. And the problem is not just how we decide this particular case, but what to do when similar cases present themselves in the future. Victar has not put forward a clear answer, but I suspect this vote will function to favor his (and like-minded contributors’) interpretations. Already, the results of lax interpretations of our vote policies has had negative impacts. Most strikingly, Victar conned another user into creating the original vote in an attempt to get his way and make the templates unsuccessful. It should not surprise anyone if something similar were to happen again after the passage of the sore-loser rule.

The situation becomes even more complicated when we try to define some terms. For example, one can accept that a "re-vote" is a direct petition for the community to vote once again on the same proposal. But even here there are complications. Taking our prior example, if someone creates a new vote for just bor+ (but excluding inh+), does that count as a re-vote or a new vote? After all, the new proposal would not be a redo of the exact demands made in the prior vote. But half of its substance would be the same. Whether to toss that into the re-vote category or accept it as a newly-minted vote is unclear.

More confusing still becomes the definition of a "vote reversal" (Victar’s terminology) and, relatedly, a "counter-vote" (Metaknowledge’s terminology). Inevitably, some will argue that a vote nullification is essentially a vote reversal. However, that elides a useful distinction between an effort to overturn a decision on its merits and one to reconsider based on a procedural question. If a vote is created or run in a way contrary to procedure, we will simply have to live with the consequences; or wait it out for potentially another year before we can do anything about it. Votes that were not only wrongly decided, but wrongly begun or wrongly operated, will govern conduct on Wiktionary. Prospective challengers will lack any recourse to appeal the decision until possibly a year after its result. That all hinges, once again, on whether a particular user (or group of users) decides on a particular day to conflate a nullification with a reversal. There is no way to know for certain how that issue will be resolved.

Already hopelessly entangled onto itself, the sore-loser rule becomes ever more unpracticable by yet another ambiguity: It has not been explained to which votes this proposal applies. No one knows whether it will be applied to just votes proper, or to RFDs, de-sysop requests, Beer Parlour discussions, or whatever else. If anything but votes proper, the proposal becomes impossible to back. If a recently-appointed sysop misuses his powers, one interpretation of this vote is that he cannot be ousted until another three or six or twelve months pass by. Clearly, we cannot let that be. Likewise, it is broadly agreed that opinion polls and RFDs are not subject to the same exactness as real votes. If another interpretation is that the sore-loser rule encompasses these other areas of activity, again the proposed policy must fail.

Second, editors are already discouraged from creating disruptive votes, and we do not need another rule to pile on additional sanctions. Many agree that an attempt to cobble together one majority to reverse the ruling of a different prior majority is unadvised. We generally accept that issues can be revisited once norms on Wiktionary change, our userbase is substantially different, and/or a significant amount of time has elapsed from the past decision. If these criteria do not stand, a revote or vote reversal is unlikely to succeed.

Relatedly, if someone is obstinate about creating successive revotes, we already have the tools to stop that sort of disruptive behavior. Unmeritorious tries to frustrate governance on Wiktionary are ill-fated, for the users who propose them are admonished and, if necessary, blocked. We have already done so in past cases. Consider the time when Dentonius proposed a string of undeletion requests at RFD. We resorted to exceptional measures like snowball-closing the votes, and we eventually blocked the user. Before we did so, we warned them that “try[ing] to discredit the rule or interpretation” of RFD just to prove a point was improper.

Likewise, a number of users have made their voting preferences clear. So many will vote against a proposal not because they disagree with the substance but because they want to disincentivize bullheaded re-litigation. One must look no further than our recent nullification vote. Metaknowledge, for example, commented that they were “slightly in favor” of the templates, but voted against them anyways because annulling a vote “to get one’s way” seemed like a greater evil. It is not just one user who feels this way. Robbie, DonnanZ, Thadh, Vox, and Mahāgaja all concurred that they were in opposition not necessarily because they disagreed with the premise of the vote but because a re-vote, on principle, was undesirable.

Third, this vote’s effect will be close to none because of the many ways that it can be circumvented. An issue can be reproposed again and again without needing to put forward the exact same vote time after time. Drawing again from the new-templates situation, a user could put forward a new vote to just include bor+, or request an appeal of the prior unblock of Victar, or ask to relax the supermajority requirement, or propose a variance on the vote’s deadline, and so on. Without explicitly retreading the same ground, a user can get at basically the same issue in less blatant ways. If the vote’s entire purpose is to ban disruptive voting practices, a major oversight like this one will ensure the vote’s failure when put in practice.

Thus, this proposal is at once too broad and too narrow. On the one hand, it casts a very wide net just to target a small class of disruptive voting behavior. On the other, it can be circumvented so easily – its central design is undermined immediately. Great problems attend the operation of this proposed policy. Chief among them, there is no telling how amply it applies, but it has the potential to stifle our ordinary processes at RFD, the Beer Parlour, de-sysop votes, and more. Worse, it can be enforced in a discriminatory way according to the interests of those who wield the vote’s text against their opponents. Given that duplicative votes are not a great issue, and we have replied successfully against them in the past, this proposal is a solution in search of a problem. But really, it is not a solution at all. It is just another underhanded stratagem for Victar to get his way on the templates vote, and on potentially other votes in the future. Despite the fact that the vote’s wording is neutral on its face, I would not bet on Victar’s scruples to assure this vote will not be misused in dangerous ways. Therefore, I must oppose it. Imetsia (talk) 23:41, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Re: "this vote […] smacks of ill gesture on the part of the vote’s creator"; "Victar’s yet to prove how they have created their vote in goodwill": I understand that you find Victar's actions to be frustrating, but I don't think that you've demonstrated "bad faith". This vote does seem to be in response to Wiktionary:Votes/2021-08/Nullifying the previous templates vote, but a more charitable interpretation would be that (s)he finds that vote to be inappropriate, and is seeking to codify a rule under which that vote would be forbidden.

Re: "They have even set the vote for a duration of 2 weeks so that it ends before the nullification vote": (S)he has now edited this vote to end after that one. Note that you could have suggested that change, or sought clarification that this vote wouldn't apply to that one, without making accusations.

Re: "Thus, for all the reasons, I call upon any sysop to delete this vote": Of the reasons that you've given, I'm not sure which ones you think justify an administrator unilaterally deleting a vote page. If you really think that literally deleting this page is the right next step, I suppose you could start an RFDO discussion?

—Ruakh_TALK 21:24, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

We don’t need this. It does not help this project. Please do not bring it to a vote.  --Lambiam 13:40, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

@Inqilābī:, I'm sorry that the Creation of Templates vote ended with nothing. I thought you would vote against the Nullifying the previous templates vote, but no, maybe you are right, if the nullifying vote passes, it may open a way for a new start. I don't actually know how to vote here, I'm kind of confused with this template conflict and don't want to make a mistake.

Which option are you going to support in the Sore-loser rule vote? I'd support either option 2 or 3, most likely 6 months option. Birdofadozentides (talk) 13:54, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

@Birdofadozentides: The template creation vote was created in error, as we do not need any vote for creating templets. So, the nullification vote seeks to annul the result of the template creation vote (as interpreted by some bureaucracy-minded people to have ended with ‘no consensus’ despite the overwhelming support), so that an editor can freely use the new templates inh+/bor+. If the nullification vote fails, I am afraid the usage of the new templates would be banned.

The sore-loser vote’s something I cannot even consider seriously; our project functions by way of consensus, and not to serve the interests of the said group of bureaucracy-minded people. I am thinking of voting against all options so as to safeguard our democratic activities. But I am not sure how many people would actually consider casting their votes— the turnout for a freedom-battering vote could be low. Let's see. ·~ dictátor·mundꟾ 14:41, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

@Inqilābī:, I see, I'll support the vote then. About the sore-loser vote, I hope option # 1 doesn't win, one year period is too much. Birdofadozentides (talk) 21:25, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

"Oppose" heading

I find the layout of this vote a little confusing, especially because only the first couple of heading levels are distinct on my browser, and thereafter everything looks the same. Can we change the heading "Oppose" to "Oppose all options" or something, assuming this is what it is supposed to mean? Mihia (talk) 21:30, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

Effect of this vote

If this passes, is a revote on this allowed?

If this vote does not pass, is a revote on this allowed? — Fredrick Campbell (talk) 07:05, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

If this vote does not pass, a re-vote is not disallowed, in the sense that there is no regulation disallowing it. Note, however, that there is also no regulation against using your toilet brush as a toothbrush, but it's not recommended. Allahverdi Verdizade (talk) 12:00, 30 September 2021 (UTC)