Basically, it's impossible to recognize the quality based on voting. This is not only because the results of voting usually show an average, but also because notion of quality is not the same for all of us. What it may be "High Quality" for a newbie will probably be a subject discussed hundreds of times for a guru, and what is HQ for a guru is most probably something that a newbie cannot understand. This is why the result of voting is an average, probably. :)

Anyway, voting is not going to improve the quality, but merely to promote middle level answers/threads.

Vlad