up vote 7 down vote favorite
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Since I'm still quite new to the site, I just wanted to poll what the general consensus is on voting down questions from people with very low rep:

As an example, I don't think the OP from this question really understands the difference between a categorical and a continuous variable. I saw that some had voted the question up, but I personally wanted to vote it down (and did) because I feel the OP didn't understand what he or she was asking.

  1. Do you think this discourages new posters if they have their questions voted down? (Even if perhaps they received answers that are voted up?)

  2. If you answered yes to question 1, is there some approximate metric, duration of account in days, or minimum rep before you believe a question should be voted down?

My motivation is that I really want to encourage my students to ask questions here, but I don't want to raise the noise level with questions that aren't well thought out. If we vote by consensus, I'd be happy to accept an answer -- but mods feel free to make this cw.

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3 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

I do not think we should downvote clear questions that merely reflect some confusion about some aspect of statistics. We should take the opportunity to clarify the confusion so that the OP learns something new and is on the way to become a better statistician.

Summary: Downvote when we see: Spam, unclear questions, irrelevant answers, trolls

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I'll just add that you can also vote to close (for duplicates, off-topics, meta-questions, subjectives) and flag (for spam and when you think moderator should do something with it, like convert to community wiki). – mbq♦ Oct 12 '10 at 17:02
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And even newbies can be expected to react to requests for clarification. So if such requests are ignored for a couple of days, I'll happily downvote or vote for closure. – Stephan Kolassa Oct 14 '10 at 21:09
up vote 9 down vote

I almost never vote down a question that is asked in good conscience to expand knowledge.

That being said, if a question is up-voted excessively, a down-vote can be used to offset. I don't think that should discourage new user. Especially if you follow the golden rule of down-voting: always leave a comment so people understand how they can improve. And equally important: if the OP does improve the question following your comment, switch over to an up-vote to reward the good behavior.

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... and comments on the reasons for upvoting are always welcome, too! – whuber♦ Oct 12 '10 at 21:47
up vote 0 down vote

I think there should be a downvote period of grace for newbies (1 month/week?) until they get familiarised with the website, after that it should be the same as everybody else.

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