“Undecided” vote on cover flags and author pictures. Why?

Why does this option exist? One can flag something as “Not a review” or counter-flag “Yes it is,” but one cannot say “I don’t know if it’s a review or not.” So why can one offer “no opinion” on a cover or a picture? If there is confusion because the flagged cover appears to bear the same title as the work in question this can generally be resolved by going to the work page and checking for a disambiguation notice or other clues. Authors may require more work. But if you are not up for that, or still unsure, why not just take a pass? And why does LT enable this form of meaningless vote?

To get it off your "not yet voted" list, I suppose. (I wouldn't really care if the option went away though)

>1 booksaplenty1949:

It's not "meaningless". It means you cannot tell from the information given whether or not an image is inapplicable or not a cover. Sometimes it is because it is in a language you do not know, and so cannot determine whether it is a proper translation of title. Sometimes the title is the same, and there is no indication on the cover or work page as to why it is inapplicable. So one is "undecided".

If you don't like it, don't use it.

As >2 Nicole_VanK: says, it gets the vote off your list, so you only see votes that are new since you last checked.

I suspect that there would be fewer people voting if they didn't habe that option.

Flagging and voting on a flag are not the same thing. If we were to vote on review flags, there would probably be an undecided option too since IIRC it's there for all voting. It make perfect sense, you will not or at lest should not flag anything if you're uncertain, so you have to flag or not to flag options. Voting is done by any member on whatever someone else flagged or proposed and it's perfectly feasible many can be undecided for whatever reason

>4 MarthaJeanne: I suspect that there would be fewer people voting if they didn't habe that option.

This is demonstrably true, since people do use the option. :-) I personally don't flag as undecided, and I'm one of the very few (sometimes I think I'm the only one) to go through the flagged covers every day to try to determine if they're valid or not. (If the cover is invalid, I also check the editions to see if there are invalid combinations. I'd guess about a quarter of them are invalid, so I split them. Unfortunately, this doesn't help with the wrong covers.)

I find that there are about a third of the flagged covers where I can't decide. As I say, if I can't decide, I don't vote, because the page does not give any reason to vote undecided; it just offers the option.

It might be a help if the instructions on the Cover Flags page said whether LT wanted us to flag as undecided if we couldn't tell.

The more curious thing is why does flagging a cover does not count as a vote? You have to go back and vote if you want your own vote to count.

>4 MarthaJeanne: And that would be a real downer because?

>2 Nicole_VanK: Okay. That’s actually a reason.

>3 lilithcat: My question was not “Why are you undecided?” It was “Who cares?” But if you are being prodded to vote by some notification, I can see the incentive to make that go away, even if you have no opinion on the subject. I personally would do without the notification in the first place.

>7 SandraArdnas: The two-stage flagging/voting process for covers is odd. Flagging a picture automatically counts as a vote.

>8 booksaplenty1949: Because, I believe it is better for mor people to vote on these things, and not always the same few.

There may be days when I'm not so sure about some of the voters. (Why did someone suggest combining fantasy with Vampires, and why, oh why did someone vote 'yes'? But even then, I think that if more people vote, the final result will be better.

>12 MarthaJeanne: Why is it better? “No opinion” doesn’t really count as voter participation. In any event, I note the same people are regularly voting “undecided.”

>13 booksaplenty1949: I assume that these people are voting yes or no in other cases.

I sometimes vote "undecided". And >13 booksaplenty1949:, I do vote yes/no in other cases -- much more than "undecided", which is a "shrug, whatever" vote, as far as I'm concerned.

lilithcat in >3 lilithcat: outlines some reasons. And Nicole_VanK's reasoning applies as well, especially for those cases when the original image that people voted on has already been replaced with a default cover, like this:



I can no longer form an opinion on whether or not the original image was inapplicable / not a cover / spam. And so I vote "undecided", both because it is the only accurate option open to me, and to get it off the list. I frequently give up voting because large stretches of the voting page are nothing but default covers once I've voted yes/no on all the ones I can form an opinion on.

>15 Petroglyph: I can certainly understand why one might have no opinion. Sometimes the local radio station’s phone-in show deals with a topic that does not engage me. But I don’t call them to say “I have no opinion on this issue.” I change the channel.

>15 Petroglyph: especially for those cases when the original image that people voted on has already been replaced with a default cover, like this

Slightly off-topic, but I have wondered for years why there were so many blank covers on the Cover Flags page. Thanks for the explanation!

>16 booksaplenty1949: Voting 'undecided' is a way to stop the same phone-in radio station coming back around the next time you are scanning through. Because maybe you don't speak the language they're talking (can't understand the text on a flagged cover image), etc.

Edited for typo.

>16 booksaplenty1949:

Once I vote on all the ones I can have an opinion on, even on multiple pages, upon refresh there's entire pages is taken up by these default covers. Not clicking "undecided" entails lots of unnecessary scrolling later. Clicking "undecided" solves that problem.

Your radio call-in show analogy doesn't work. I don't go to the cover voting page in order to click "undecided"; I go there to click "yes" and "no", to contribute to the smooth(er) working of LT. I never know ahead of time what conundrums exactly I will be served.

"Undecided" is as legitimate an answer to the question "is this cover applicable to this work?" as are "yes" or "no".

>19 Petroglyph: Your radio call-in show analogy doesn't work. I don't go to the cover voting page in order to click "undecided"; I go there to click "yes" and "no", to contribute to the smooth(er) working of LT. I never know ahead of time what conundrums exactly I will be served.

This raises an interesting point. I don't go to the page to vote undecided, either; I too go to vote "yes" or "no" on every cover I can -- often spending a non-trivial amount of time investigating alternate names or translations to try to do so. (This is not always decisive, but I try.)

I don't know if there would be a way to make this possible, but what this suggest to me is that it would be nice, if a cover received enough "undecided" votes, to put up a request for why the cover is being flagged.

Come to think of it, I think that might be a good idea whether anyone votes "undecided" or not. A quick note of the reason for the flag -- e.g. "This is just Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, not Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass" -- would be tremendously helpful.

I realize that that constitutes a feature request. Would anyone be interested except me?

>20 waltzmn:

it would be nice, if a cover received enough "undecided" votes, to put up a request for why the cover is being flagged.

But it's already there. "Inapplicable to this work" or "Not a cover" has to chosen.

But it's already there. "Inapplicable to this work" or "Not a cover" has to chosen.

That is frequently not enough information to decide.

I just checked: My next decision on a cover flag will be my 50,000 (!) -- and I only flag yes or no, not undecided. What does the other person know that I do not know? I just checked the next-to-last page of 100. There were, if I counted correctly, 39 instances on that page where I could not decide whether the flag was correct or not. 39. This even though I try to always look at the cover in detail, check alternate titles, inspect it for which volume it is. Based on those numbers, I have examined on the order of 80,000 flagged covers over the years, and have had to pass on 30,000 of them.

Simply giving a type of flag does not tell the reason for the flag, which often involves information that the rest of us don't have or haven't noticed.

Let me offer one specific example where it would undoubtedly help. The (rather exasperating) historian John Gillingham writes mostly about medieval English history. His special field is the era of Henry II and his sons. So he has written two books about Richard Yes-and-No: Richard the Lionheart in 1978 and the much more substantial Richard I in the Yale English Monarchs in 1999. The two are very regularly confused (including by me on one occasion). If anyone saw one of them filed as the other and say the cover flagged, don't you think the odds of an error very high?

>22 waltzmn:

So you want free text, such as we have with picture flagging.

I could see that. Some of the covers are very blurry, so it's hard to tell why they might not be applicable. The ability to say something like "this cover belongs to the abridged version" would, indeed, be helpful.

I withdraw my objection, Your Honor.

>23 lilithcat: So you want free text, such as we have with picture flagging.

Yes. I'm thinking of it as a sort of disambiguation notice for covers.

Sometimes it's not needed, but sometimes it is.

Thanks for understanding. :-)

>23 lilithcat: The main reason for flagging a picture, apart from duplicates, avatars, or a paper bag over the author’s head, is that it is not a picture of the author in question. Going to the author page is unlikely to clarify the misidentification. But going to a work page will usually make it obvious if the cover is inapplicable because it belongs to a film or a children’s picture book with the same name, an abridgement, a substantially revised version, etc. Often there is a helpful disambiguation notice. No serious research required.

>25 booksaplenty1949: But going to a work page will usually make it obvious if the cover is inapplicable because it belongs to a film or a children’s picture book with the same name, an abridgement, a substantially revised version, etc. Often there is a helpful disambiguation notice. No serious research required.

Obviously this is true in some cases. But, surprisingly often, it is not -- which is why I was unable to make a decision on more than a third of the cover flags in my sample of 100. The image may be too small to be read, it may have an ambiguous title, it may be in a foreign language, the author may have a book that goes by multiple titles. Again, I speak from experience -- more than 50,000 covers examined! If the person who flagged the cover could give more information, it would really help in some of these (numerous) unclear cases.

It would also help to find the many mis-filed covers that arise from incorrect combinations. And, yes, there are a lot of those. I had one of those yesterday, where six or seven editions of a Ligurian travel guide had been combined with The Hebrew Bible Today: An Introduction to Critical Issues. That one was a pretty obviously wrong cover, but it led me to have to split off all those mis-combined editions.

>15 Petroglyph: Those are "covers" that show on Amazon but somehow don't render on the LT flagged list though.

>27 Nicole_VanK: Ah, thanks for the clarification.

I agree that a clarification left by the flagger would considerably clear up many issues (including being undecided on blank covers).

Apparently ISBNs get reused, which is why the Amazon cover for, say, Polyamory Today gets used 45 times for Anne’s House of Dreams. Confusing.

>29 booksaplenty1949: Apparently ISBNs get reused, which is why the Amazon cover for, say, Polyamory Today gets used 45 times for Anne’s House of Dreams. Confusing.

This is true, but it is also true that books get improperly combined, and so their ISBNs get shuffled. I don't have statistics, but improper combinations are quite common. It would be an interesting trick to try to figure out which is the greater source of problems.

>30 waltzmn: I always check the “editions” list before flagging a cover, because if a book which does not belong there is removed from that list, its cover will generally disappear too.

>31 booksaplenty1949: I always check the “editions” list before flagging a cover, because if a book which does not belong there is removed from that list, its cover will generally disappear too.

Depends on how the cover was added, from what I can tell. If a user added it to the work-as-combined, it usually stays with the dominant work. But I agree with the point about checking editions and splitting -- as I've mentioned above, I do the same.