-6

You automatically convert questions with more than 30 answers to CW (community wiki), then, reputation will not be given to the main person who made the answer. I have seen answers with more than 300 upvotes for a person with 150 rep, he didn't profit from his effort because of this problem. This may keep people from answering very common questions if they know this!

I am so sorry for the bad expression, but it is not fair IMHO!

For example:

Create Excel (.XLS and .XLSX) file from C#

The only fault of "Peter Majeed", "Jan Källman", "Panos" is that the question has 31 answers!!! it is not fair at all, for example the user jan kallman have only 151 rep, his answer has not changed by others, his answer has 138 up-votes only (1380 reps), he benefits only from 15 of them (150 reps only)!! if the question has 29 answers, he will benifits from them all, I think this should be mentioned seriously.

* EDIT *

I am not objecting to converting the questions to community wiki, I am objecting to not give the reputations to their owners!

Ok, what about this question:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/477748/what-are-the-best-c-sharp-books

This has 20 answers, why the excel question's reputations gone out, but the c# book question got all of their reps?? they are both an off-topic questions!

What about this??

Calculate age in C#

For example: Mike Polen's answer has 456 up-votes, he didn't got except a a little of them!!

* EDIT *

This is what @Pekka written:

@Mohammad where is the effort in that question that's supposed to be stolen away? What about that question should be worth thousands of reputation points while actual good questions that people put hours or days of effort in will usually gain 10 upvotes max?

This is the best answer IMHO, this has convinced me 100%!

Take this question and answers:

Quadrilateral Shape Finding Algorithm

This questions are worth reputation and respect! These answers won't take more than 250-400 reps with the bounty, although they worth more, but my previous examples wouldn't bring any rep compared with the last one!

21
  • 4
    Can you point out some example questions where that's a problem? In my experience, those questions usually are of the fluffy opinionated kind which is barely on-topic and shouldn't earn rep. Dec 26, 2012 at 17:46
  • I have done that!
    – Saw
    Dec 26, 2012 at 17:48
  • 7
    That is a "shopping list" type of question. Product recommendations are no longer considered constructive questions. Dec 26, 2012 at 17:48
  • No, it is a serious question, I put my self instead of "jan kallman", I won't contribute to any of stack-exchange products if I see this!
    – Saw
    Dec 26, 2012 at 17:52
  • 4
    @MohammadSakherSawan It's an off-topic question of the shopping-list kind, where the answer's rep will mainly depend on the popularity of the product, and not on the quality of the answer. So IMO it's a good example for why this kind of question should be CW. Dec 26, 2012 at 17:54
  • @CodesInChaos : Then the whole reputation system is wrong, this is not related to my question.
    – Saw
    Dec 26, 2012 at 17:56
  • 5
    @MohammadSakherSawan The reputation system is intended to reward high quality answers, not those that recommend a popular product. Yes, it's broken, but making your suggested change would break it even more. Dec 26, 2012 at 17:58
  • @CodesInChaos thank you for deleting my comments :) I didn't suggest any changes, my suggestion is to give people there properties :)
    – Saw
    Dec 26, 2012 at 18:05
  • 2
    1) I can't delete your comments, and I don't think anybody else did. 2) You suggested disabling the mechanism that turns questions with many answers into a CW. That's a suggested change. 3) You used a bad question as example (off-topic shopping list), so you won't convince many to make that change. Dec 26, 2012 at 18:06
  • Your second example is another subjective "what is best" question and the third one ("How do I calculate someone's age") had 3 years as a non CW question before getting converted on Aug 16 '11. The bike shed effect plus the fact it was posted by Jeff means the answerers there probably did very well out of it. Dec 26, 2012 at 18:20
  • 1
    I am so sorry @CodesInChaos about saying that you are who deleted my comment! but I have presented two other examples!
    – Saw
    Dec 26, 2012 at 18:22
  • Your second example is another shopping question. Your third example has a bit more merit. But Mike Polen certainly doesn't deserve 4000 reputation for an answer that was wrong for years. Dec 26, 2012 at 18:24
  • 1
    when there really is a substantial effort put in some post, removing its CW status is dead easy. Been there done that
    – gnat
    Dec 26, 2012 at 18:25
  • 1
  • 2
    Maybe you're misunderstanding it. The reputation gain/loss stops applying after the post is CW, not before.
    – Makoto
    Dec 26, 2012 at 18:34

2 Answers 2

18

Why to steal people effort

What effort?

The example you show consists mainly of this sentence:

What is the best tool for creating an Excel Spreadsheet with C#?

this took about 15 seconds to write down, and (no disrespect to the OP) didn't exactly take a genius to come up with. Why, in your opinion, should it be rewarded with 1800 reputation points?*

Show us a question that really cost some effort on the OP's part, or is a great, clever question in some other way, that has more than 30 answers. I predict most, if not all, questions you'll manage to come up with are "what is the best X" type kind of questions (which have become off-topic on SO in the meantime, btw).

* = theoretical because the daily reputation cap would prevent the OP from gaining the entire amount.

16
  • That's mainly an argument for per-post rep limits. Dec 26, 2012 at 17:49
  • I have added a very obvious example!
    – Saw
    Dec 26, 2012 at 17:51
  • @Mohammad I'm referring to that example. How is writing What is the best tool for creating an Excel Spreadsheet with C#? worth 1800 reputation points?
    – Pekka
    Dec 26, 2012 at 17:51
  • It may worth little less, but you can't take most of them!, there should be a more elegant way to prevent these cases.
    – Saw
    Dec 26, 2012 at 17:54
  • 6
    @Mohammad I imagine the asker of that question got plenty of reputation. It took a long time for 30 answers to accumulate. All reputation before that, he got to keep. And one could make the argument that isn't fair. It's not much of a question really, is it?
    – Pekka
    Dec 26, 2012 at 17:54
  • 2
    That question will, hopefully, be deleted. It's just another broken window encouraging poor questions.
    – Rosinante
    Dec 26, 2012 at 17:54
  • @Rosinante , My question, or the excel's one? :)
    – Saw
    Dec 26, 2012 at 17:57
  • 1
    @Mohammed the Excel one.
    – Pekka
    Dec 26, 2012 at 17:57
  • @Pekka, It is actual and not theoretical, because the question asked 2 years ago, and they were not voted in a single day!
    – Saw
    Dec 26, 2012 at 18:01
  • 6
    @Mohammad where is the effort in that question that's supposed to be stolen away? What about that question should be worth thousands of reputation points while actual good questions that people put hours or days of effort in will usually gain 10 upvotes max?
    – Pekka
    Dec 26, 2012 at 18:04
  • 1
    @MohammadSakherSawan the excel question.
    – Rosinante
    Dec 26, 2012 at 18:05
  • 1
    No offense intended but this post suggests Meta is the appropriate place to 'judge' reputation awards. "How is writing What is the best tool for creating an Excel Spreadsheet with C#? worth 1800 reputation points?" I understand the point of your statement (even agree with it) but I've always thought making those sorts of arguments was against the rules (noone can question votes: up or down unless malice was involved). Is that no longer true? Does that mean we can start comparing content:votes ratio? i.e. This question has 100 votes but its crap, compared to this thoughtful question w/5votes.
    – Mike B
    Dec 26, 2012 at 18:20
  • @Mike arguing about how much reputation questions should gain (if any), or even questioning the value of upvotes, has never been against any rules that I've ever heard of, and it's being done all the time on Meta. It would be a shame if we couldn't do that, wouldn't it? Comparing the content:votes ratio is fine, and an entire class of questions has been pushed off the site over the past year or two based on a judgement of questions' value... so don't hold back :)
    – Pekka
    Dec 26, 2012 at 18:22
  • @Pekka Fair-enough. I've always had it set in my mind that if you come to Meta looking to question a vote-count you would be shown the door in a brisk manner. I'll see if I can come up with some examples.
    – Mike B
    Dec 26, 2012 at 18:30
  • 1
    I have edited my question, @Pekka has changed my mind with his comment on the question!
    – Saw
    Dec 26, 2012 at 20:53
2

The examples you've shown are questions that aren't a good fit to the Q&A form. For the most part, these questions are years old, and modern variations of them would be closed on sight. See also: Gorilla vs. Shark.

As to the "stealing effort" question - I adamantly disagree. In fact, I feel that someone contributing to a CW does so for the benefit of knowledge to be shared and collaboratively built upon. That's what Community Wikis are about. Questions that make it up to that large answer count, regardless of how on/off topic the question is, do contain a wealth of knowledge, which helps the community overall in some respect.

While reputation is nice, it shouldn't be the end-all be all goal for recognition and effort. If you're in it just for the rep, perhaps you're in it for the wrong reasons.

EDIT: If you do feel that the answers there are worth some form of reward, then you can attach a bounty to the question, and award one manually.

2
  • The reps are not everything, but they are the main thing makes SO the first IT questions site (As I think), It has a very strong system, but i think this is a problem in this system!! IMHO.
    – Saw
    Dec 26, 2012 at 18:29
  • Reputation is fun, but gaining/contributing knowledge should be the overarching goal for users of the site.
    – Makoto
    Dec 26, 2012 at 18:31

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .