I think awarding people who ask questions is really important. Good questions (and especially good titles) are what targets traffic to the site. Bad questions mean that the hit rate is lower, and that people are less likely to get what they wanted from search results. Voting is the easiest way of gamifying this, but not the only one.
Perhaps this is something that you could experiment with but I dont think it would be wise to make this a first cut thing as voting is tried and true.