It's come to my attention that users, even established users, aren't actually aware of many of the basic tenets 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 my understanding that downvoting anything is not supposed to be used as a mechanism for flagging inappropriate questions, punishment, or for marking questions you don't like... And yet, I worry that many users aren't aware 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"

. A poor answered question is defined by the site as:

"Not useful."

I wonder how many users have actually read the above quotes before?

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.