Voting down is not a crime! Use the site tools, the right tool for the right job

A down vote can be brutal. You can also think that there is no such thing as a dumb question, that is not always the case. The amount of low quality questions we get is concerning in Ask Ubuntu.

We do, at all times, try to help the user and Ask Ubuntu works very good at it.

But there are some issues with questions on the site, those are mostly:

• Bad formed questions with very high spelling errors, poor word choices, generally low quality
• Users that did not bother to search at all for anything related to their questions
• Questions that are not real questions (and generally off topic ones)
• Users that are looking for Unicorn answers, ie: I want Unity to have unicorns cleaning the virus from my system, how do I do that?
• Questions with no information what so ever useful to solve the issue in case

These questions are all over, if you look at the front page mainly 40% will fall in to any of these categories.

This is a bit concerning, editors cannot take all of this work on their shoulders. Don't get me wrong, I love editing and I know every editor out there does it with pleasure but the user is responsible for the quality of the post he created at all times.

We should not be here to save the site from the bad boggy phantom of low quality questions, the site has tools for that. One of them is down voting. If you can't edit it, can't figure out what is being said, if there is not enough information on a question or the question is just all bad you should down vote it, no matter if the user has 1 of 100k rep.

I would, 100% of the times, like to see a question down voted, eventually flagged and closed than to see the amount of low quality posts you see around. We should be proud of the quality we bring to the site. Fail to do it does not help at all.

Clean up effort is working, start at the source!

At the moment Ask Ubuntu is going thru a massive clean up effort that is working brilliantly, I cannot say more thanks to all users involved and praise the involvement of the site's moderators on that, but we can do it better and we can start earlier.

A bad question that is not fixed or updated by the user that gets down voted will vanish from the site after some time and from what I can see in the flagged questions on the moderators queue you see a lot of questions that if simply down voted a long time ago would not be there in the first place.

Start cleaning now, if it cannot be edited and fixed within reasonable parameters, if it does not belong here, if it shows low effort to create or no effort to supply information, if its very confusing in a way that you cannot figure out what is being asked or what the user wants, down vote it.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying I agree with revenge or competition down voting, that is just silly and will get you in to trouble sooner than latter.

I guess I am trying to say here is that we should really prefer to see a bad started question be fixed and improved because of a down vote than to leave if lingering around for ages before someone decides it is a low quality question or that the user never replied to that 4 months old comment asking for more information.

I am simply asking you to stop being so condescended on posts and leave your opinions about the effects of a down vote behind. Be objective, think of the possibilities, leave a comment and down vote if that is the correct thing to do! Ask Ubuntu should shine for the quality of it's contents and that is the responsibility of all of us. We cannot supply that if we are not using the tools available in the site.