I should also say that I think whether or not upvoting and downvoting should have guidelines is largely a choice about what kind of community you want to create.

If you provide guidelines, you're prescribing the behavior you'd like to see and, it seems, doing more to manually try to carve out a culture.

If you leave the barest guidelines, you allow the culture to define what it means organically.

I don't think either of those is right or wrong. I think prescribing behavior through guidelines is more complex and harder to do well, though, but again, not better.