The graduation of Mechanics.SE was delayed for around 9 months to allow time to increase the number of eligible voters in a post-graduation election. I'm not too clear about the specifics (so I asked on meta.SE), but it seems likely that graduation at Islam.SE would be delayed for exactly the same reason.
Jon Ericson ♦ writes:
Mechanics currently has 258 users with 150+ reputation. We can't know if there will be a record turnout (44%) or a median turnout (14%).
So we are delaying the graduation of Motor Vehicle Maintenance & Repair until there are more potential moderator candidates and voters. ... In the meantime, I'd like to suggest a few things ...
Vote ...
Invite ...
I make this meta post in anticipation of the "Islam.SE graduation is delayed..." post.
Data explorer lists Islam.SE at 440 users with 150+ reputation (and Mechanics.SE currently at 1356 users). The Area 51 stats are:
Mechanics.SE (Area 51) at time of graduation
Islam.SE (Area 51) currently
And keep in mind, many of the users included are inactive.
We need to upvote!!
We need to upvote for users to gain the reputation to make them eligible voters. If we don't upvote, then what?
Islam.SE is among the most downvote-heavy (possibly the most downvote-heavy) of all StackExchange sites; see Our upvoting patterns compare poorly to the other religion StackExchange sites; let's change this!. We're particularly harsh on questions.
Why upvote/downvote?
Perhaps it's time we revisit the idea of educating the community of the purposes of voting.
I get the impression:
People are voting according to I don't like this topic rather than this post is useful.
Users don't seem to distinguish between downvoting and voting to close.
The vaguely defined scope of the site promotes the notion that this question is off-topic because I feel it's off-topic. This should result in a vote to close, whereby the community can cast their votes, but users are instead downvoting.
Voting is meant to be a kind of quality filter, as per the tour page. But it's also how we determine who has what privileges.
How can we jump-start upvoting?
I'm confident if we get a small number of dedicated users consistently upvoting the good content we're generating, we will change the spirit of the site. We can change the focus from downvoting bad content (or topics that we don't like) to upvoting good content.
Mechanics.SE used an interesting incentive where Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 ♦ gave away 100 rating points to anyone earning the Electorate badge:
Vote on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions.
It seemed to work well, so I'd be tempted to repeat this here.
