What does a question need to get upvoted?

Question

Recently we can see more and more questions that do receive only few upvotes if any, despite them having upvoted answers.

Some answers to low voted questions are brilliant gems but they may be overlooked when the question itself is not highlighted by having corresponding high votes.

We should put more effort in voting not only on answers but also on questions. The SE network does encourage such upvoting on questions with several badges that can be earned by doing do:

• Nice, good great question
• Civic duty
• Electorate
• Suffrage
• Vox populi

To increase the votes on questions we may consider the following

• Show some respect to the questioner because any time we write an answer the question should have been useful.
• Highly voted good answers can only be written on a useful question.
• Whenever we look forward to an answer of a question we can not answer easily the question may deserve an upvote (the more upvotes a question has the more effort we should put in writing a good answer).
• Please do not downvote an otherwise well written questions when we can not answer it (this sadly happened in the past).

What minimum requirements should a question have to be upvotable? How do we define a "useful" question? Should questions be edited if they have good answers but do not yet meet our criteria for being useful?

Answer 1

As soon as you deem to answer a question, you should also upvote it,
well except for the rare cases of "Reversal", or if you have a trivial case of ask google

As a native speaker of german I consider some questions even higher than this, namely: questions that make me think about my own language, questions that require me to do some mental research (or even actually checking things up in the dictionary)

These always will get an upvote by me, given the case they are readable. If by any chance the question is written in an extremely confusing manner or showing no research effort whatsoever, I usually downvote and leave a comment, which I can change into an upvote, as soon as the question is edited ;)

Whenever I upvote one or more answers to a question, I usually upvote the question too. Why?

As soon as a question brings forth a good answer, the question has it's valid reason of existence and a proof of being a good question, namely a good answer

Well as soon as the question does not deserve an upvote, even though there is a good answer to it, the rule Takkat gave applies:

Where there is a good answer, there should be an upvotable question. if there is no such question: edit it.

This means:

An upvotable question is relatively easy to understand and read.
It should set a basis for a good answer

This also should be the minimum requirement for any question asked, because breaking down a problem to the understandable is the minimum to be done before asking a question.

And to make it readable is simple courtesy, that requires almost no effort (pressing return is not that hard...)

"useful" questions should relate to "realistic" cases of usage and not (theoretical) constructs that are obsolete in german language, or constructions that no one uses.

Sometimes a question may not be useful, but it is still a good question. In this case I think an edit is not necessary, but should be encouraged.

Answer 2

I do not agree with the notion that upvoting an answer should be semi-automatically coupled with upvoting the question, because “it prompted such a good answer”.

As an example, consider this question: Why is it "den zwei Autos" and not "die zwei Autos"? The only answer is by myself, and it is actually my second highest ranked answer at present (+14: 14 up, 0 down). The question, on the other hand, only has one upvote.

I guess the answer got upvoted because it is correct and to the point. I wouldn’t call it particularly interesting or insightful, though, and this is related to the question being on a very elementary level. There is no way (or need) to “fix” the question by an edit, other than to replace it with a completely different question. It is fine as it is; but why should it get a dozen upvotes?

Answer 3

The question and suggestions are wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong. So entirely wrong!

There are three criterias for a question, which show up on hovering the up arrow:

• shows research effort
• is useful
• and clear

which means, you can have three brilliant answers, but there hasn't been any research effort which is a different thing.

Similar, a question might be not very useful. I would say that a very specialized question is less useful than a more general question. For example a question might be, whether names ending with ~stein like Rubinstein, Einstein, Wallenstein and so on origin from somewhere with the meaning of stone. Pretty general and maybe useful. Only asking for Einstein is less useful, but at least it is a popular name. If somebody has an uncle called Waldstein and asks for that name, it is not very useful and would fit the somehow vanished bullet point "too specialized/localized" from the close-question dialog.

But there might be a specialist giving a good answer. If you want to vote on answers, vote on answers - it's simple as that. Play it straight forward and not around 3 corners.

People can search for questions by content and needn't search by upvotes. There are many good questions I'm not interested in. Vote them up like insane - I wouldn't read them (again).

The SE network does encourage such upvoting (my emphasis; uu) on questions ...

No, it encourages upvoted questions - the person responsible for such a question. Upvoting is encouraged too, but not as much as your list suggests.

Show some respect to the questioner

Show respect to the questioner in the chat. The voting is for voting on the question, not on the questioner. Don't abuse the voting system, especially not for welcome posts. In 2 months no visitor will recognize that a somehow bad question was upvoted to make the questioner feel good, except you abuse the comment system too, which makes it worse. The system should be fair and clear and communicate what is explicitly stated (see above).

Highly voted good answers can only be written on a useful question

It is just wrong. Beside the arguments already made, the answer could be upvoted because it is making some popular claims, which wouldn't be what the system is intended to be, but why should such an abuse automatically jump over to the question?

Whenever we look forward to an answer of a question we can not answer easily the question may deserve an upvote ...

Yes, or it might not be a clear question and deserve a downvote.

Please do not downvote an otherwise well written questions when we can not answer it (this sadly happened in the past).

How do you know this? Can you read minds or did you downvote yourself?

What minimum requirements should a question have to be upvotable? How do we define a "useful" question? Should questions be edited if they have good answers but do not yet meet our criteria for being useful?

Requirements: See above: Clear, useful and shows some effort. If all points are met: upvote. If some are met, weight them.

A question is useful if the chances are good, that more people will have the same question, if it raises interest. If I'm interested in a topic, I tend to vote it up (but the other points, preparation and clearness can prevent it). If I'm not interested, I tend not to vote it up. This way many votes will show high interest and usefulness, low votes less so. If I'm not interested, but I'm impressed by effort and clearness, I vote up though to encourage the style of asking.

Questions should always be edited if you can improve them without changing the intent of the author, useful or not. I already edited some questions to improve the clearness or the spelling but voted to close because of other reasons.