Do you also think that JSE members should vote more often?

Question

I feel that we have very few actual voters on the site. Most members do not bother to vote too much. However voting in SE sites is essential. In my opinion, among other reasons (help good questions/answer distinguish, help keep the unanswered questions number low, etc), it also creates engagement and motivation and people want to visit and revisit and offer more to the community.

I compare our stats and votes with craftcms SE, which is a similar to ours website (similar age, number of users). They may have more daily questions, so more reasons to vote, but their community seems more passionate about voting, therefore crediting answers and questions - they overly seem to be more engaged. Their number of votes is a lot higher than the analogy of the number of daily questions they have compared to us.

• Joomla SE Monthly Voters
• CraftCMS SE Monthly Voters

So, I am wondering if here at JSE we should become a little bit warmer about voting.

What do you think?
Shall we encourage users to be more generous with their votes?
How could we make users be aware of the importance of voting?

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I have seen so many good questions and answers left with 0 votes in our site.

Another stat from our site: There are about 5000 questions + 7000+ answers. This means that for each user there are about 12000+ reasons to vote. However, it's only me with about 4000 votes, then 5 users with 1000-2000 votes, 1 user with ~850 votes and all the others have voted less than 500 times.

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Similar Voting Discussion on Workplace.SE Meta Site:

• Vote Early, Vote Often

When should I vote:

• When should I vote?

Original Vote Early, Vote Often blog post by Jeff Atwood:

• https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/10/19/vote-early-vote-often/

Answer 1

Having been the first to admit about being a little lazy as of recently about voting, I've started to vote more and more on questions and answers.

I do hope others, more so those who are more active on JSE will follow suite, if they haven't already.

I'm not sure exactly how we can let users know about the importance of voting "ethically". Commenting on questions would most likely come across as being " too pushy".

I think that those that have seen this meta question start to vote more, it will encourage others, once they see higher votes questions/answers.

Answer 2

I agree, voters need to be a bit more generous when they find a correct and educational answer. When done appropriately, more reputation points will lead to more engagement, more privileges, more interest in moderation, and increases to the quality of posts.

Of course the risks of upvoting on less deserving or undeserving will have a scarring effect on this site as a researching tool.

This site is noticeably less informed about good coding practices (or even coding as a whole). This is because people who are drawn to CMSs as a gateway into the web development industry are seldom equipped with the necessary knowledge to differentiate between "the good, the bad, and the ugly".

For example, when JSX users upvote an incorrect solution, not only are they potentially learning bad practices, they are effectively encouraging others to "blindly trust" the bad content. ...and let's be honest, CMS users are often looking for shortcuts and are very likely to copy-paste.

One example that I found: How to Use IN Clause in Joomla Query

So what needs to be (urgently, passionately, earnestly) done is a call to knowledgeable few on this site to review all questions, answers, and comments. Call out the concerns, test the answers, clarify the questions, and vote in a way that speaks the truth and rewards good, correct, educational, complete content without feeling like a sledgehammer to the face.

I find that, compared to my behavior on Stackoverflow, I seldom flag/close/downvote on this site. I am more likely to leave a whistleblower-type comment or ask the OP for improvement. Stackoverflow clearly has a higher standard for content, but it also has a reputation for having "rough feedback", so some of the appeal for newer Joomla developers to come here is in the "softness" of the community.

On a personal level, I wish I could help more here to improve questions. The fact is that I am too new to Joomla to understand the "half-complete" questions -- so I am powerless to attempt to clarify by editing or even attempt to ask for clarification. I have done virtually all I can do to questions tags with [php], [mysql], [json], and [regex]. Beyond those tags, I am generally unqualified.

I will continue to do everything that I can to help -- as we all should -- because that is the spirit of Joomla.