It's come to my attention that users, even established users, aren't actually aware of many of the basic tenants of this website. For example, Voting. I was recently informed by a 2K+ user that "down voting" a question was to punish users for doing something "bad".

The actual reason for downvoting a question is to alert a user to a poorly asked question, and hopefully is followed up by a comment to help the user to learn how to improve what they've asked.

It is not supposed to be used as a mechanism for flagging inappropriate questions, punishment, or for marking questions don't like... And yet, it seems many users here are completely unaware of that.

A poorly asked question is defined by the site as: "[A] question [that] does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful".

And yet I wonder how many people have taken the time to read that?

It seems to me that there should be more readily available reference to point users to who don't understand how this site is designed to be run. The FAQ is so light on information that it doesn't cover topics on basics like this.

Just my 2c.