<p>My name is Katey and I work in community development at Stack Exchange. I've been studying stats.se for a few weeks, trying to figure out ways to improve this (already pretty great) site. My coworker Brett White and I have been emailing users on sites we've identified as having great content and engaged, awesome users but less than stellar overall voting activity. </p>

<p>I emailed a few users last week and got some great feedback -- particularly that it can be difficult to know whether a question is good or bad if you aren't familiar enough with the subject, software or field that is being asked about. That makes sense, Statistics is a huge and varied field, and I wouldn't want to ask someone to vote on material they were wholly unfamiliar with. However, I don't think it's helpful to the site to be too hesitant to cast votes on questions just because we think we might not know enough, if that makes sense. I also don't think that voting for voting's sake is going to be helpful, but there may be a happy medium in there somewhere?</p>

<p>First, here is a document that Brett put together focusing on <a href="https://docs.google.com/a/stackoverflow.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArYLbq29rqM2dFlsWnE1UGxYTGcyaV9EaGFhZ2RWS2c" rel="nofollow">90 low-vote questions on the site</a>. </p>

<p>Essentially we want to make sure that questions that are getting a lot of search engine traffic are quality questions that are well-representative of the site and community. Take a look at these and see if they're questions you hadn't had a chance to decide on voting on either way. It's entirely possible that you've already looked at them, but this seemed like a good place to start evaluating.</p>

<p>Keep an eye on new questions as the come in, as well, since it's possible that some of these low-voted questions are just slipping through the cracks when they're first asked.</p>

<p>This is the first step in what we're doing to help make Cross-Validated an even more useful and awesome site, so please discuss other ideas to improve the site and community on meta and in your chat rooms!</p>
