Why voting in Discogs is broken

I just need to rant again about something in Discogs that I really do not like and that is the voting system. In Discogs you can vote on the quality of the data of a release. For example, if someone completely screwed up an existing release, you can vote that it is "Entirely Incorrect" and that will then revert the commit and restore it to the previous state. Or, you could vote that it is "Complete and Correct", signalling that all the data that can be on there is on there and it is correct as well. There are also:

• Correct - not all information might be there, but at least it is correct
• Needs Minor Changes - information is there, just needs a quick brush up
• Needs Major Changes - the release needs a lot of work

This is to have some sort of "self cleansing" mechanism, to alert people to mistakes, and to weed out bad contributors, as getting many bad votes will put you into "Discogs school" (the "Contrinbutor Improvement Program", or "CIP") and so on. Except: it doesn't always work. Let me tell you why and walk through a few scenarios and then talk about how it can be done better.

A vote is cast on the entire release, not just on the latest edit. That means that if you are changing a release as a janitor, but there is garbage in the release that you don't know about because of whatever reason, you can still get bad votes because of what someone else did. So if you don't want any bad votes you should not try to improve releases other people added unless you really know what you are doing (personally I don't care too much about bad votes). But the problem here is that basically people will prefer having a release with bad data over having a release with a little bit less bad data, just because the changes that were made were not perfect. It is mind boggling.

The biggest problem however is that certain actions, such as adding pictures, or adding a release to a master release does not seem to fall into scope of the voting system! I have had it that I made a change to a release, someone else than changed the pictures of the release to something that was completely wrong and then someone else voted "Entirely Incorrect", not only reverting my (correct) change, but also leaving the wrong pictures, as these were not reverted by Discogs. Sigh.

There are also some people playing "turf wars" using the voting system, using bad votes to take revenge on someone. It is quite childish, but hey, that's the Internet for you.

A better voting system

What I think would work a lot better is if it would be possible to flag parts of the data as incorrect. That way people doing edits won't be punished for others screwing up. At the minimum I would like to see this done for pictures or pictures and adding releases to a master release to be taken into account.