Why the lack of voting on questions at ELU?

Question

As a relative newcomer to ELU, I'm often struck by the lack of voting on questions here, and especially upvoting. It might be case that you receive many poor questions, but compared to for instance BiologySE (where I'm more active) the difference is striking. There, voting on questions is more generous and liberal than voting on answers, following the principle that many can evaluate the quality of questions while it's more difficult to evaluate if answers are correct. Here at ELU, the pattern seems to be almost the opposite.

Looking a questions from the last two days (112 questions), 70 of them have a score of 0 or lower (median zero, 22 with a negative score), even if many of them, to me, live up to the statement: "This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear". As comparison, the number of zero or lower voted questions out of the last 100 at a couple of other SE-sites is (number of Qs with a negative score in parenthesis): Academia-SE 35/100 (14), Biology-SE 33/100 (11), and Tex-SE 33/100 (2). I understand that communities are different, but I still think these numbers can be informative. Overall, the lack of upvoting seems to be the biggest issue for ELU, and the average scores of upvoted questions at the other sites are also much higher.

My main point is that the initial impression of ELU is rather hostile and focused on negatives. Since people here seem rather hesitant to vote up, it is also easy for single downvotes to tip the scales so that questions (and answers) end up with a negative score. Again, some questions and answers certainly deserve this, but to me, many useful questions and answers end up with a score of zero or lower at ELU.

For full disclosure, this post was sparked by my own last question, which currently has a single downvote. This question is certainly not excellent or very advanced, but I fail to see why the overall impression should be: "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful".

Help me understand why voting on questions is so sparse at ELU, and why there is a relative lack of upvotes compared to many other StackExchange sites?
What makes ELU different?

Answer 1

As an active user of both ELU and Biology.se, I might be able to shed some light on this. First of all, the scope here is very specific and very rarely understood by our users. This is not a site for questions that any native speaker of English could answer. It is a site for

linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.

In other words, any question whose answer is known to the average native speaker of English is off topic here.

We get a huge number of questions that are simply too basic for this site. In fact, this was (and is) a big enough issue to warrant the creation of a spin-off site, English Language Learners. You know all those poor homework questions we keep getting on Biology.se? Well, the equivalent here is a wealth of questions that any native speaker would be able to answer. Unfortunately, because this site is much larger than Biology, the number of such questions we get is enormous. The community, therefore, is far more stingy with their upvotes since they are the best way we have of showing what questions we want here. On Biology, on the other hand, we're still in beta and are making a conscious effort to improve our voting stats.

Basically, while Biology.se is open to both professional Biologists and laymen, this site is not. It is not a site for simple queries about the use of the English language. It is targeted at "serious" language enthusiasts. A term that is, admittedly, very vague but gives you an idea of the scope.

That's the general problem. In the case of your question specifically, I'm guessing that you are running afoul of two problems. First, single word requests are particularly disliked by the site's regulars. They are rarely very interesting as questions, they are often very badly written and often ask for absurdly specific words. For more on that, see the meta discussions here and here, and the many similar posts.

Secondly, you don't provide enough context for someone to understand what you really need to say. You explained what X is but what is Y? Where will you be using this phrase? In what context? Is this technical writing? Popular science? A newspaper article? The more you tell us, the better your chances of getting a useful answer.

So, in conclusion, a single word request is very unlikely to get many upvotes here and while people do actually vote (and more so than in Biology as far as I can tell), they choose what they vote on carefully.

Answer 2

I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I view upvoting as appropriate in two situations: (1) when I think that a question or answer is especially interesting or insightful or well presented, and (2) when a question or answer that seems reasonable and unobjectionable, though not particularly outstanding, has been jumped on by one or more downvoters whose low opinion of the question or answer is not (in my opinion) justified. I don't downvote, because I think that the more appropriate way to handle unusually bad questions or answers is to close them.

On the other hand, I don't see any reason to habitually upvote run-of-the-mill questions and answers that fall into the "reasonable and unobjectionable" category, just because they satisfy the standards for inclusion on the site. And since I'm strongly interested in relatively few categories of questions that appear on EL&U, I rarely feel inclined to upvote questions that fall into other areas—such as single-word requests, syntactic analysis requests, and parts-of-speech labeling requests—even on the rare occasions when I try to answer them.

If the attitude of other site users toward the subject areas within EL&U that interest them (and that don't interest them) is similar to mine, then right out of the gate you have far fewer people voting at all on, say, "grammaticality" questions or "style" questions or "terminology" questions than you might expect given the number of participants on this site.

Also, some users feel strongly that certain categories of questions shouldn't be welcomed (or tolerated) on EL&U at all. So in addition to low upvote totals owing to Balkanized interests within the universe of subjects covered by EL&U, you have the possibility of some quick-trigger downvoting of questions and answers that fall into categories that individual users want to discourage because they consider them inappropriate for the site.

Ultimately, I think that the low upvote totals for many perfectly acceptable questions and answers on EL&U aren't really much of a problem. Just because a particular category of question has few enthusiastic followers—and therefore garners few upvotes—doesn't mean that the questions and answers it attracts can't be well conceived, well expressed, and useful.

I am more concerned that certain question categories (such as "punctuation" and "style") not be banished from EL&U because some users deem them incompatible with the scholarly mission of a site truly dedicated to linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. I take a broad view of what the word usage in the phrase "English Language and Usage" encompasses, and consequently I think that a wide range of questions ought to be acceptable here.

Though I may not find a particular category of questions interesting or fruitful to pursue, that doesn't mean that no one else reasonably may. And since I'm under no obligation to pass judgment on questions in those categories, it makes sense for me to attend to the categories of questions that I do find interesting and to leave the others, unmolested, to their enthusiasts.

Answer 3

TLDR: People cast about 5 votes per new post per day on both English and Biology. For further exploration, run both this first query on totals and this second query on rates against different Stack Exchange sites.

Comparing Like with Like

You have to compare like with like before you can compare anything at all. ELU and Biology are very unalike in daily visitors and questions.

Sorted by traffic

                        Beta? Visits  Questions
*English                no      286k    63  
 Arqade                 no      246k    37  
 Ask Different          no      232k    56  
 Programmers            no      138k    35  
 Unix & Linux           no      203k    84  
 Electrical Engineering no       72k    67  
 Workplace              no       25k    12  
 Rôle-Playing Games     no       15k    14  
*Biology                YES      10k    12  
 Webmasters             no       13k    16  
 MSE                    no        9k    26  
 Puzzling               YES       8k    11  

Sorted by questions per day

                        Beta? Visits  Questions
 Unix & Linux           no      203k    84  
 Electrical Engineering no       72k    67  
*English                no      286k    63  
 Ask Different          no      232k    56  
 Arqade                 no      246k    37  
 Programmers            no      138k    35  
 MSE                    no        9k    26  
 Webmasters             no       13k    16  
 Rôle-Playing Games     no       15k    14  
*Biology                YES      10k    12  
 Workplace              no       25k    12  
 Puzzling               YES       8k    11  

_{That 10k traffic number is rounding; the actual Biology traffic number to two significant digits is 9.8k not 10k.}

So given that we are comparing unlike things, it would be unsurprising to learn that voting patterns may differ between the two sites. In some ways they do, but in the average number of votes cast per new post, they do not. This is illustrated below.

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Comparing Totals

Here are the results of a query comparing posts, questions, and answers per day:

English daily totals for votes, questions, answers

Biology daily totals for votes, questions, answers

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Comparing Rates

Given the number of votes per day and the number of posts (questions + answers), you can also plot how many votes there were per post on average. That’s the red line below. You can also try dividing the vote total by each of question and answer separately, but that isn’t as reasonable. Those are the other two lines below.

English average daily vote-rates per post, question, and answer

Biology average daily vote-rates per post, question, and answer

The way to understand that is to suppose there are 100 votes cast on 10 posts of which 2 are questions and 8 are questions. Then 100v / 10p is 10 v/p, 100v / 2q is 50 v/q and 100v / 8a is 12.5 v/a. It is a bit of a silly metric, perhaps. You can really only trust v/p in any regard, since you do not actually know the split on how v were applied to q&a separately.

Once you realize that and look at the red line on both graphs, which represents how many votes each post received on average, you notice that in fact both graphs show that line weaving around the 5 line, with ELU coming just a bit under.

So they aren’t really all that different.

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For Further Research

I very strongly encourage folks to run both queries (the one on totals and the one on rates) against various different Stack Exchange sites, preferably those comparable in visits, questions, or both, to the ones under discussion.

Answer 4

N.B The privilege of viewing the number of upvotes and downvotes a post receives is visible when you earn 1,000 reputation points.

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The fact of the matter is, even questions which are not easily answered by native speakers, are well-researched, and cite references, might still earn a few downvotes on El&U. This is a hard crowd to please. In its beta days—back in 2010—a "the-answer-is-obvious" question earned generous approval, and generally speaking, there was a greater air of tolerance and good-will.

As an example of today's tough crowd, see these comments left by two different users on two separate questions of mine. Users who did leave a note and explanation for their downvote (one of those rare occasions when I get a glimpse of the criteria used by some members.)

Comment one recommends that I redirect my search towards the different usage between abolish and abolishment, and their subtle difference in meaning. Please note I included the Oxford dictionaries links for each word, and an excerpt from a well-respected website citing there is effectively no difference in meaning.

Comment two criticizes me for not doing enough research. Please note that this comment received two upvotes which means that three users agree the question lacked research. I was stunned by that observation but luckily, some users did reply in my defence and the question was deemed useful enough to merit eight upvotes.

Comment three left by the same user on the same question says that the original question title "How common is the term “boondoggle”?" contradicts with the etymology tag, and says the question is not about etymology. I explain that it is, but nevertheless I modify the original title and specifically ask about its origins. However the user in question, never sees fit to reverse his downvote after I modify the question to appease him.

Is it any wonder I have ill feelings when the same user downvotes my answer to a question, which I posted several days later. An answer which he points out does not answer the OP. By the way, I am the OP in question. When I politely disagree and argue then he must therefore downvote the other three answers which answer my question, he acknowledges his error and professes he cannot reverse his downvote, because the system prevents him from doing so. He does upvote all the other answers nevertheless—hooray! But not my question—boo!

My point being that there are users who will take an instant dislike to a question or to the OP and downvote accordingly. There are users who rarely upvote any question or answer, I suppose they think a good question can only be posed by someone who has linguistic credentials. Maybe they're right. There are veteran users who upvote generously, in silence, and some who upvote and give voacal encouragement to newcomers. There are users who will help improve the legibility of questions being posted, which includes correcting typos and writing English with a capital letter. But seeing for the 500th time english or inglish it does get wearisome, and irritation (I admit I am feeling this myself) sets in.