The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
Some stack exchange sites get lots of both upvotes and downvotes for question and answers. Others get much fewer votes. Do we want to be a high-voting site?
Here is one perspective from Scott Morrison over on meta.Tex.SE that I would support here:
Every Stack Exchange site will eventually end up with a different "base level" of voting --- that is, the expected number of upvotes for a question of a given level of excellence. (This effect occurs because people see a good question, but already with a certain number of votes, and think "oh, I would have upvoted this, but it already has enough".)
It's easy for us to affect this "base level" by encouraging high levels of upvoting now. We're setting the standards, and this really will have an effect.
(On MathOverflow, we were very active about this early on, specifically encouraging all the initial round of users to vote early and often. You can compare statistics, and see that the average vote total for a MathOverflow question is much higher than on any of the other SE 1.0 sites.)
In case it's not obvious: the rationale for wanting this base level to be high is that it provides better positive feedback to good contributors.
WilliamKF
Oh, yes, please! There is nothing more discouraging than writing a really good question or a really good answer - and then getting one, or maybe two votes. On SO, I've had accepted answers that got ZERO upvotes - not even one from the person who asked the question and accepted the answer.
Which brings up another point - encouraging people asking questions to accept one of the answers. It doesn't have to be right away - perhaps a later answer will be better - but if the question has gotten at least one good answer then one of them should be accepted no more than a week or two later.