I'm new to this SE site and haven't cast any votes on answers yet. I've been withholding because I'm not sure how to vote. An up vote can express a few different things, such as “insightful!”, “well-written!”, “funny!”, “made me think!” or “well-researched!”. I see there's been some discussion about whether answers should provide sources/references, and personally I think on a site dealing with history they really should. Especially since, if I understand the answers to my earlier question correctly, this site is not supposed to be a problem-oriented SE site where answers are mostly evaluated on their helpfulness, but an understanding-oriented SE site where answers are mostly evaluated on their accuracy. This puts me in a dilemma when seeing the many answers on this site that do seem “insightful” or “well-written” but which do not seem particularly “well-researched” because they don't provide any references. Should I up-vote anyway or withhold completely? It makes me wish I could do something like cast a half vote to incentivize the answerer to further improve the answer by providing references.
So I have two questions really: (1) Should there be some way, that is not tangled up in the many different things an up vote can express, to incentivize answerers to provide well-researched answers? (2) If so, I assume an addition like half votes or any other site-specific mechanism (“scholarship ratings”?) is unlikely to be added to the SE software, but is there something else that could be done? The cooking SE site is providing encouragement by doing weekly prizes, which is at least one idea.