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I've started to delve into the meta site, and now am scratching my head.

I'm being asked to vote up more questions. But what are the criteria I should be using to vote up?

What does my vote up say? Is it a kind of "thanks, great question to ask" to the asker? Is it how it was asked, and what other research that was done?

I'd love to have some objective ideas that I could come back to that would help me decide.

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There's no one method for determining which questions to vote up, but my own criteria is generally (not exclusively!) that the question satisfies one of these three conditions:

  1. The question is well formatted, well structured and provides enough information to invite an accurate answer

  2. The question is something that I believe others will also want to know the answer two

  3. The question is something that I want to know the answer to, even if I have no pressing need to know the answer right now

The goals of the voting mechanism are to encourage quality and accuracy, leading the site to be the best possible resource it can be.

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    I kind of think that we should put this in a section on our faq entitled "Voting". I know that the voting is covered elsewhere, but somehow it hasn't seemed to be enough. meta.salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/90/…. – Peter Knolle Oct 25 '12 at 1:01
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    Agreed @Peter Knolle. Something like this response would be helpful just to have some criteria in mind. I think particularly having the thought in mind "does this question improve the quality and accurace of SFSE as a SFDC help site." Thanks! – pchittum Oct 25 '12 at 11:29
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Something I saw mentioned recently that really made me reconsider my voting, was that just because an answer is already the most popular doesn't mean you shouldn't vote for it.

Upvotes are free, you get 30 per day. Vote for everything that meets your voting criteria regardless of how it has been voted aready

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Something that I have found relatively strange on this site is that sometimes questions receive a good response, yet they have no upvotes at all. For instance, I read a good question today that had two valid responses. The question and both posts had no upvotes. The interesting thing to me was the fact that the two users who responded found the question interesting/good enough to answer, but not good enough to upvote? I don't understand that.

We should be upvoting as often as possible. It promotes a stronger community and it provides incentive for users to provide better questions and better answers. Now, they may just be fake points and I doubt anyone's goal here is to really just get the highest score, but it is a good mechanic that this particular site doesn't utilize enough in my opinion.

The way I view it, if the person takes the time to write a question, as long as it looks like they put some time or effort into it, it should get an upvote. Even if it is something I already know, it is something that clearly others may be looking for at some point. If it is formatted well and provides a clear logical question, give it an upvote! As Daniel pointed out, upvotes are free. Let the users know this is a site where we appreciate questions, small or large!

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