Why are there so many question with no votes but with answers that have upvotes?

Question

Example (at the time I'm posting this question, the question below has 0 votes): Setting IActiveView extent?

And maybe the example above isn't the best example, but I see this happening a lot with better questions. IMO, if a question is worth the time to answer and it gets upvoted and an answer is accepted, I think that is a good indicator the question is useful and adds value and should get an upvote or two (if I see these questions, I usually +1). Am I being too generous with my upvotes?

And since I usually +1 when I find them, the moderators won't find as many but it seems like I'm always upvoting up 4 or 5 a day that fall into this category.

Something else to keep in mind: a lot of stackexchange users put a votes:1 or a votes:2 in their searches to filter out the crud. If you do that on gis.stackexchange.com, you'll miss some good questions that actually have good answers.

Answer 1

(I think you're correct in observing that many deserving questions aren't voted up, but the one you link to is not a typical example. In particular, any question that requires two pages of code in order to pose usually has not been well thought out or researched and shouldn't garner many readers.)

There actually is a badge to encourage voting for questions: Electorate. A couple of users have it already. Maybe as more acquire it others will get the point.

I recently raised this issue in an answer to a different question on meta, so I won't repeat those points here.

Other SE sites are discussing similar concerns. A few months ago @jrista on the Photography meta site provided a nice analysis along with a proposal to measure overall voting rates. It's worth a read.

In other meta exchanges (I forget exactly where), people have pointed out that it's psychologically easier to vote for answers than for questions. I have constantly to remind myself to return to each question in order to vote for it, even after I've been sufficiently engaged to answer it. Maybe the mods here can think of some gentle ways to remind or encourage people to vote for well-formulated questions.

That last adjective is helpful, I find: "well-formulated." It has been objected on some sites that few people can understand even a fraction of the questions. Well, I have that trouble everywhere, especially here. But I believe I can tell when a question is well posed, neatly and succinctly put, and invites an interesting or useful answer. I vote those up whether I really understand them or even sympathize with them. It's genuinely hard to come up with good questions and to express them well.

Finally, many questions here don't get many views. That's a shame. One of the most useful aspects of the SE sites is that you get a daily overview of the issues that are engaging people in the community. In short order you can get a larger sense of the things people are working on. Intellectual curiosity, if not professional diligence, would suggest that we all take a few minutes occasionally to read these questions rather than focusing only on the familiar subjects--and why not vote up the good ones as we're doing so?

Answer 2

I often see very poorly expressed questions generating a flurry of very good answers. In these cases I think it perfectly appropriate for the question itself not to be upvoted.

Sometimes I've been tempted to edit the question to bring it up to the level of the answers. I restrain myself though because writing my own well formulated questions is hard enough, and I know what I'm after (mostly). It's rare that I feel confident of understanding the asker's goal well enough to attempt reformulating.

Answer 3

In my case, upvoting a question is also because of how the system is presenting the upvote. If you look at the question upvote, it says :

the question 1) shows research effort, 2) it is clear and 3) it is useful

now if you look at answers, it says :

the answer is useful

So there are 3 conditions to upvote a question, and only one to upvote an answer : the system is clearly biased toward upvoting answers if you follow those marks. This could partly explain the difference.

My point is that many questions do not include the research efforts of the OP (even if he did search). In the example given, the research effort has only been described in the edit of the question, so you need to return to the question in order to see it.

Finally, it is worth noting that popular questions are rewarded with badges, so that an useful question that is unclear or lacks some research can still bring some reward. Also, there are new badges to act as incentives for the answerers to edit the questions.