Voting is not only important to find errors in edits, but it also helps you learn new things. Even if you just vote “abstain” you get the opportunity to follow the discussion in the edit notes. I believe that taught me at least as much as the guidelines or as making mistakes myself and getting comments on my edits.
Of course I don't expect anyone voting as excessively as me.
Here are my current search results for all open edits I haven’t voted on yet:
Stats like that are misleading. We don’t all have time to look at every edit like you do.
I subscribe to my collections. Collections based on physical CDs I own and other bands and audio tracks that I have digital copies of. Also a few artists. I look at these most days to see what has been edited, but I don’t “abstain” to everything like you do. So I don’t have a count in thousands.
If I see issues I “abstain” and comment. If I see stuff I know is correct, I vote “yes”. Or throw a “no” when I know it is wrong.
Generally I see many many edits flood past that I can’t really say anything either way. Like lots of merges, etc. They look correct, but I have no way of being sure. So I don’t vote unless I am 100% sure.
I believe it is pointless for me to vote in any form on tracks I know nothing about.
Voting involves time to check facts. We don’t all have that time available to read and vote on everything.
Yet I think there is much more fact checking is going on than the vote counts can show. Many more eyes are on the data than votes being cast. The auditing of data works really well here as it is rare to find huge mistakes as people are checking this data in so many different ways.
I vote on everything that is open every night when I get that email. I have it set to subscribe to all my edits, but I don’t get notices for the vast majority of artists I make edits to. Not sure why. I wish I did, because I’ve seen many of my edits get changed with out me ever noticing to after they are done without a chance to review them.
That’s not how that works if I understand you correctly. Just editing an artist doesn’t subscribe you to them and subscribing to an artist doesn’t mean you get mail notifications about the edits.
You’ll have to go to https://musicbrainz.org/edit/subscribed (or refine the search to only get open edits as results) regularly and check the edits. You’ll only get emails once you voted.
Are you sure about this? I have subscribed to a number of small artists specifically to follow edits and changes. That seems to work fine. There is a subscribe link on the right hand side of each artist that allows this to happen.
When you add an artist to MB you get automatically subscribed to them. Which can be a bit comical when adding in instruments.
Note: I see “subscribed” to mean appearing in my “My Data” \ “Edits for subscribed entries” menu. It is this list I check over (mostly) daily. I don’t check MB emails at all. Just the website.
It does mean that though, unless you’ve turned that off in your preferences (“Send me mails with edits to my subscriptions”). (AFAIK it’s still on/“Daily” by default.)