Replace accept rate with citizenship level

Question

I see that accept rate has now been removed from display on questions. I think this is not a great solution for reasons that waffles explained well. Take it away waffles!

On one hand accept rate bothers me a lot, it is a one-dimensional metric that does not really give me enough information about how upstanding a user is in the community. It is used frequently to bully users and leaves a horrible taste.

On the other hand, introducing accept rates heavily increased the amount of accepted answers in the system. Which in turn helps close loops and motivate the community.

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When we introduced the accept rate stuff we were careful not to add too much of a value statement. On hover we do not say "horrible user, never accepts answers".

Going forward I would much prefer that we retired accept rate in favor of a more general metric that covers a variety of "citizenship" metrics that do not result in rep.

• Does the user vote?
• Does the user accept answers?
• Does the user answer questions?
• Does the user edit or suggest edits on questions?
• Does the user flag stuff?

I don't know, perhaps we should go the other way and show a tagline of honor for the top N percent of users.

Rather than removing accept rate, I propose replacing it with a citizenship percentage or level, based on the above criteria. This would be a powerful motivator for better sites, and gives much more useful context for the question.

It is not that displaying accept rate was bad, so much as incomplete. I always had plans to circle back and improve it to be a citizenship level.

Displaying this metric on questions might help participants think of the game at a bit higher level. What is more useful to the longer term health of a community: a single OK question, or an engaged community member who assists and participates — as a citizen, not just another drive by hit and run?

Answer 1

When we introduced the accept rate stuff we were careful not to add too much of a value statement.

100% == complete. < 100% == incomplete. Without any on-page guidance as to what was acceptable, this is how the number was actually interpreted.

While I like the idea of a general-purpose "citizenship" metric in theory, watering it down with stuff like flagging just makes it harder to interpret. The best idea we could come up with ended up being sort of a parallel reputation system that increased whenever you did something positive on the site - while interesting, I'm not convinced this would do much to encourage specific forms interaction the way accept rate did.

I don't know, perhaps we should go the other way and show a tagline of honor for the top N percent of users.

I like this idea more; fits with the old "praise in public, criticize in private" advice.

What if, when posting a question, folks who accept answers to most of their questions (say, over 70%) got a little "responsive asker" indicator below their name?

We could even expand this to other metrics without watering anything down:

• Neophyte editors whose recent edits have been 100% approved get an indicator of this in the suggested edits queue.

• Flaggers whose recent flags have been helpful get an indicator in the flag queues.

• Answerers whose past answers are seen as helpful (up-voted / accepted) get an indicator on their new answers. (Kinda uneasy about this though; could unfairly skew voting)

Displaying only positive indicators in situations where they actually matter gives folks something to work toward, without encouraging public witch-hunts.

Chiding in private

Another suggestion for modifying the accept rate display was to display it only to the author - this avoids some of the public shaming, without actually making this obvious to the asker. If this number also linked directly to a list of questions that lacked an accepted answer, it'd also give them specific action items to improve that number, without requiring them to dig up documentation on what it actually pertained to.

Frankly, doing this alone might be enough to provide most of the benefits of accept rate, without the noisy comment harassment.

Answer 2

We already do kinda sorta have a mechanism in place to measure your "level of citizenship": badges. All of the sample actions you've mentioned are covered by badges.

• Does the user vote?
  • Supporter
  • Critic
  • Suffrage
  • Vox Populi
  • Civic duty
  • Sportmanship
  • Electorate
• Does the user accept answers?
  • Scholar
• Does the user answer questions?
  • Teacher
  • Self-learner
  • Nice answer
  • Necromancer
  • Revival
  • Enlightened
  • Good answer
  • Guru
  • Great answer
  • Populist
  • Reversal
  • Generalist
• Does the user edit or suggest edits on questions?
  • Editor
  • Excavator
  • Archaeologist
  • Strunk & White
  • Copy editor
• Does the user flag stuff?
  • Citizen Patrol
  • Deputy
  • Marshal

You may argue that badges don't do a good job of measuring citizenship, but:

• They're already coded
• They're already shown everywhere
• They can be tweaked
• They can be revoked

We don't need a new statistic, a new number or set of numbers to minmax or berate others over. We just need badges. Perhaps we need "better" badges, or "more balanced" badges, but I posit that the badge counter is already an okay way to estimate your involvement with the community in a deeper way than reputation does.

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If you think just the badge count doesn't cut it (sigh), you can be cruel to Jin and give... badges for badges. For example, take flagging. You do Citizen Patrol and get a first-level flagging badge badge: . For Deputy, you upgrade to . For Marshal you get . You make the flag to end all flags and you get , then my shitty drawing makes your eyes burn and you ragequit Stack Exchange. This looks unnecessarily... PHPForums-y to me, however. I think that badge counts alone can do it.

Answer 3

This sounds good at first: a citizenship "score" could become an integral part of your profile, maybe on the same level with reputation. It could be a way to award those who put a lot of time and effort in cleanup / quality control in their tags instead of just accumulating rep.

However, looking at how even the prospect of getting a fricking badge leads to widespread abuse of the system (voting, editing), it's a very real danger that this would become just another number you can increase through harmful actions like random voting, or approving BS edits.

I'm sure Rosinante's approach is shared by many community members: we often already check out users before we answer a question. How invested is this user in the community? Did they bother to register a user name? What kind of contributions do they make? Do they answer questions as well? I tend to be much more willing to help fix an imperfect question when the OP has a track record of answering questions, or shows a real interest in the community. How about instead of creating another metric, making the existing ones easier for us to look up in the user's profile?

Maybe even in a separate "citizenship" tab, designed in infographic style.

We could display....

Definitely:

• Successful close votes (ie. votes cast that lead to a closing)
• Helpful flags
• Question / Answer ratio, or maybe even better: answer upvotes
• Number of comments
• Some of the "hard" badges, maybe those that are displayed in the pre-election stats
• Meta participation

Maybe (I'm unsure about these because they are so easy to game):

• Voting
• Edits

That would show us all we need, but without the problems of a new metric.

Answer 4

Here's why I feel this way.

We've demonized talking about the accept rate, and comments making reference to such were always considered inappropriate comments.

I'm playing devil's advocate here, so I want to challenge the merits of bringing yet another measure of a Stack Exchange participant, and if it will benefit or adversely affect Stack Exchange at large.

1. It's yet another way to measure participation.

We have badges, reputation, number of answers, number of questions, number of reviews...all of this information, while not readily available on a single screen, is a great measure of active participation on any SE site. Maybe this suggestion combines this information into one screen (heh), but that brings me to...

2. It's yet another way to flame users.

Remember that commenting about a user's accept rate was considered a no-no. What would having a "poor" citizenship rate earn a user?

Say, for example, we have some user117243*. They're new to Stack Exchange and participate on Stack Overflow and TeX.SE. They're fairly active in both - over 500 reputation on both sites, asked plenty of questions, answered their fair share, flagged some answers/comments, and participate on Meta. However, they don't always accept their answers, don't have many badges, and don't review or make peer edits. Are they a bad citizen? If so, why? They're one of the many people that actively participate on Stack Exchange at a level I personally feel comfortable with - general active participation.

Let's presume that they're stuck with a low "citizenship rate". They're going to get comments about it, they're going to get flamed for it, and that will actively discourage their participation on Stack Exchange, something that is a huge detriment to the system. That's already occurred with the previous measure, but I shouldn't be beating a dead horse.

^{*: Sorry to user117243; I pulled that number out of thin air. You're awesome, d00d!}

3. It will feel incomplete on its first implementation.

There's lots of ways that someone measures valuable participation. Personally, I feel it comes not just from a collusion of badges and general participation, but also meaningful participation - I mean, I've been vocal about the way the reviews are done, and I feel that anyone that's a "good citizen" and participates in the review queues should be doing them well. I would personally feel that a measure of quality of reviews not being present in the system would render it "incomplete".

There's a lot more out there that could be thrown into the mix, too.

• How often do they participate in peer edits?
• Do they post on Meta?
• Is the average score of their questions above 5 (minimum 10 questions)?
• ...and so forth...

I'm not entirely sure or convinced that we can cover all the bases of "activity on this.

Answer 5

I don't mind having this, but it should not be displayed on questions. The quality of a question can be determined by reading it. Knowing more about the asker should not change your vote -- Stack Exchange is about posts, not users.

A user's rep/stats may help when determining the correctness of an answer. But for a question... there really isn't any positive change brought forth by it. It all boils down to this:

What do you expect a user to use this newfound knowledge about the asker for?

I myself don't see this newfound knowledge being used for good.

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Instead of this, why not display some metric like this publicly on the user's profile? Or, if you feel that it may lead to a lot of complaining (similar to the whining brought forth by the public display of flag weight), then display it privately.

Answer 6

While I liked the idea of a citizenship rating on first glance when I read about it, after thinking a bit more about it I have two problems with it:

I don't think such a single value can effectively express the value this user adds to the community. There are many different ways to contribute positively to an SE site: asking good questions, providing good answers, voting (but not indiscriminately), making good edits, flagging appropriately, participating on meta and more. The actual value of the contributions of the user depend much more on the quality of each action than the quantity, and that is something the system doesn't really know.

With the exception of some extreme cases, it doesn't really matter to me who asks the question, it only matters how this specific question is written. If the question doesn't show any effort, I might decide not to answer. I would not decide not to answer if a user doesn't edit much, and even if he doesn't vote at all it would not be that important, as the asker is not the only one who votes on answers. In the cases where user behaviour would stop me from answering it is usually evident from the bad question itself, and such users are also typically caught by the question ban.

And as a last point, I suspect that this would only lead to replacing the "please improve your accept rate" comment by "please improve your citizenship", "please vote for other user's posts", "please help by editing posts" and similar noisy comments.

Answer 7

At a first glance, we have a single-valued citizenship metric. It's called 'reputation'. We have a multidimensional citizenship assessment. It's called 'badges'. Given that the OP invented them, it is somewhat humorous that he would pose this question.

It seems to me that the problem comes in assessing people who don't have much rep or badge real estate. Is this because they are deadbeats? Or is it because they haven't been around very long?

However, I suspect that any metric will have this problem, unless it has a time axis, and, even then, it's dubious. If we say, 'rate of rep/badge gain', we penalize well-behaved people who stop in when they have a question or answer, and otherwise have lives.

One possible direction to go here is to observe that we measure signals of goodness but not badness (give or take downvotes) and so we don't get much discrimination between 'good but casual' and 'icky'. This might lead to consideration of making downvotes much more punishing. Thus, people who participate lightly will tend to have more rep than poor citizens.

The other way to look at it is to focus on the banning system. If the system is doing a good job of banning the truly awful, is it really that important to draw fine distinctions between the others?

I generally don't need rep, badges, or accept rate to get a good idea of what sort of OP I am dealing with. I simply apply ask the following questions -- and weigh the answers to all of them:

1. Have they registered and selected a user name? A few userXXXXs are worthwhile, but most are not.
2. If they have a user name, is it boastful, flakey, or otherwise cringe-inducing?
3. Does the question have an informative title? If not, chances are that the experience of reading the body will be a further letdown.
4. Is the question 'plz send me the codez', or a rant, or founded on counterfactual premises?

Somewhat like a questionnaire in a fluffy magazine, one can add up the results of these, and pretty easily make a decision whether to spend time. Thus, if I see a question that has bad premises but looks otherwise good, I might invest the time in comments or an answer to try to comb the thing out. If, on the other hand, I see some of the other hallmarks of badness, I won't do more than downvote or vote to close or both.

Finally, I am not really excited about the concept of acceptance as it plays out. Far too many questions get bad answers accepted, either due to the OP wandering away after the first answer, or due to the OP not knowing enough to judge. You can write 'the check only means that it helped the OP' as many times as you like, but readers will still view it as some sort of official endorsement.

Answer 8

Let's start with your question:

What is more useful to the longer term health of a community: a single ok question, or an engaged community member who assists and participates -- as a citizen, not just another drive by hit and run?

That is of course trivially simple to answer. I want a citizen. I want a user who asks good questions, gives good answers, upvotes and downvotes correctly, edits things into shape and....accepts the correct or helpful answers he receives. And to make this crystal clear, my objection to accept rate was not in contradiction with any of these things.

But the question becomes, does displaying a citizenship metric help in creating the positive effect of ultimately getting more involved users? And does it not suffer from similar downsides that became the downfall of the accept rate?

Let's for a moment assume we implement the metric. And I stumble upon a user who asks a question. What to do? Well, that's simple really, isn't it? It's a great question, so I'll answer it because I can. Community wins and the site has some additional great content for new visitors. Or the question is bad, in which case I can address that through voting, closure, editing or whatnot.

Strangely enough, at no point did I need the metric there. Before your edit you argued that it would be a

proper guide for "should I answer this question, was it asked by a fellow, engaged citizen?"

Ehm, who cares? Was it a good question? If so, then not answering it just because the user is not an engaged citizen would only end up doing harm, wouldn't it? The site would lose out on adding great content. Sure, I might not be guaranteed to get my 15 rep, but is that so much of a problem?

And if it's a poor question, how engaged the user is doesn't really matter either. It's a bad question. Present me the most engaged user of the site. If he asks a bad question, it's still a bad question. And I would respond to that exactly the same.

But what about the positive effect of a citizenship metric? Wouldn't users want to be displayed as a "good user"? Sure, those who already care would certainly care about the metric as well. But they are fine anyway. And those who only care about simply having their questions answered won't care a lot about a metric either.

And displaying any metric has another side-effect, similar to some of the problems with the accept rate. You are implicitly putting the policing of users into the hands of the community. And while I don't want to discredit all the nice users who were merely informative, there were also those who went overboard. I'm talking about the negative comments. The badgering.

Sure, a broader metric might make it harder to pinpoint the actual "problem" with the user, but if there is something "wrong" users will be quick to pick up on it and comment on it. And do we really want that? There were already measures in place to nuke accept rate comments with a single flag. So apparently we don't.

Engaged users will always be engaged. Users who simply don't care will never care. And those who don't know can be informed by the system. You don't have to leave that up to the community.

My proposal:

Implement your metric. Implement several metrics if you want. And if you realize something is amiss, have the system poke the user behind the scenes.

• Tell them they might want to evaluate the answers they received.
• Inform them that there are review tasks awaiting them if they've never even visited a queue.
• Perhaps even lower their privileges. "You only ask in high volume, never accept anything, rarely get upvotes and don't contribute otherwise? Okay, less questions for you per week/month"

That I can see have a positive effect. A visible metric...not so much.

Answer 9

I like the idea of citizenship, but I don't think it should be in lieu of the accept rate. Let's close the accept rate chapter for now; interested users can always use either this script or use the accept_rate entry via the API.

I would much rather see the rep based privileges be replaced with an effort based privilege, thus leading to different "citizenship levels". There are several high rep users who absolutely do not deserve most of the privileges they have right now (a recent example), and there are several low rep users who do an exemplary job of assisting in janitorial work, but don't gain access to the tools, because they're not motivated primarily by reputation.

This was also the central theme behind my previous request to roll out the privileges based on effort. One positive change that came out of that was in making the 5k privilege more substantial. I feel that there is potential to go further than that.

Answer 10

You raise excellent points. The only thing that troubles me is that we might, by adding a new metric system, find ourselves at the same predicament - people might start discriminating based on the metric.

Bart said:

But as long as you're displaying the accept rate, people will comment on it, criticize users for it and possibly reconsider answering because of it. And while I'm of the opinion that a low accept rate should not stop you from answering (we're here to make the internet better after all) and that the possible reputation gain (or lack thereof) should not factor in either, I can't blame users for considering it. It's in their face after all. And we're only people

Let's face it, some of us have the luxury to be good citizens(voting, accepting answers, editing questions, etc.), while others just need an answer .. if we're aiming to help the greatest number, shouldn't we remove any potential barriers to someone getting helped?

I think we should reward good users, yes... but just in a way where it wouldn't interfere with the simple case of a question needing an answer.

Answer 11

It would be interesting to give it a try by showing "citizenship level" value at MSE for 2-3 months.

As for how to calculate the citizenship level, I am pretty positive that whatever would be measured, it would better be expressed in logarithmic scale: it would be much less interesting to know if one user made 1.25 more actions than another as opposed to if there was an order or two difference. Logarithmic scale looks like the best fit for that.

Regarding what to consider for citizenship, from what you wrote it looks like general idea could be briefly described as

all the actions user does in the system

Note above naturally leaves reputation out, since reputation is given to user by others. The (maybe incomplete) list of actions includes everything that may be potentially visible to others:

• registration, association bonus
• posts
• answer accepts
• bounties offered
• edits (including those done to own posts)
• votes cast (including those to close, delete and votes on comments)
• comments
• flags (probably including declined ones, more on that below)
• chat messages
• bookmarked questions ^{that one feels slippery; included only because it formally fits above definition}
• reviews
• days visited

Since the actions listed above are very very different, making it somehow "sorted" or "weighted" could make the system too complicated to understand. Because of that, it would make better sense to me to just use sum of plain numbers, without making a difference between eg helpful and declined flags etc.

Above approach (plain sum of plain numbers) intentionally ignores details and nuances of specific actions because I believe that these should be addressed by badges.

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It's that easy, double amount of actions => citizenship level increments by 1.

   actions | level
   --------|------
         1 | 1
         2 | 2
         4 | 3
         8 | 4
       ... | ...
     16384 | 15
       ... | ...

As an example, current citizenship level at MSE for gnat is about 14, for Jeff Atwood: about 16.

• Note how this would also serve a purpose previously addressed by accept-rate indicator: seeing that user performed hundred(s) / thousand(s) actions gives one a sufficient confidence that user won't skip accepting an answer "by mistake", without substantial reason. And the opposite, seeing the low citizenship level means that user has not yet much experience using the system, sending a "signal" that they might benefit from a friendly advice / guidance.

^{Side note on whether to count deleted posts / comments or not. I for one have no strong preference here. However given the fact that posts and comments technically can be (and sometimes are) undeleted it feels a bit more reasonable to account for these. Another point in favor of that is, it looks more consistent with the way how historical reputation is kept for deleted posts.}

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This is possibly related: What data about meta has eluded Stack Exchange until recently?.

Specifically, I think that if there was an explicit way to see level of user "citizenship" (participation / engagement) - both for main and meta sites, this would make it easier to discover a fairly painful mistake made in estimation of the meta influence.

Answer 12

I was unhappy with the removal of the accept rate.

IMO responsible SO citizens used it responsibly; I know I tried very hard to, particularly after participating for awhile. I left my share of "accept rate" comments; eventually I changed them to be (a) more explanatory, and (b) deliberately shifting the blame on to answerers, not askers.

I don't know how "citizenry" would be calculated. I think I'm a mostly-good citizen, although I tend to be a douchebag sometimes, especially in a few known situations. That should count against me, but evaluating douche-baggery is pretty fuzzy.

I'd like to see something that takes in to account how a user interacts with SO overall.

I don't know how it could be implemented. IMO the accept rate is actually reasonable, but the use of the accept rate is where things tended to fall over. Flagging of "just" accept-rate comments took care of a lot of that (IMO).

Answer 13

At the risk of flogging a dead unicorn, I think that there's another angle here.

All this discussion turns, I think, on the concept of 'citizenship.'

I'd suggest that we could usefully consider users as sorting themselves into three categories:

1. Members of the community
2. Well-behaved casual visitors
3. Trouble

The first category are the only people who are going to build up a significant inventory of reputation. If they are experts, they are answering questions. If they are not answering questions, they are engaged, repeat, visitors who ask questions. They ask good questions, they vote, and, yes, they even accept when an answer actually helps them.

The second category are people who turn up, at most, from time to time. They don't infest the first page looking for things to answer. They don't create a lot of questions. When they have a question, they ask it. And, again, they ask on-topic, coherent, questions. We'd like to hope that they would click on the vote arrows or the check mark from time to time, but I'd hate to think that we'd hate on them if they did not. Simply showing up and asking a good question should be enough. That 'makes the internets better.' That provides fuel for our more obsessive participants to answer and to vote for.

The last category, are, of course, the reason for all this discussion. Whatever their frequency of appearance, they are people who do not add good content to the site.

If you want to go creating metrics, by all means. Just, please, design them to draw a line between (2) and (3), not between (1) and (2).

Answer 14

The aim of the reputation was to say how much someone is rewarding the people who spend their time to answer his questions. There are many users who ask a lot and later even won't care for accepting or even upvoting.

But the problem is that not all questions that have answers have an answer that can be accepted. I've asked even once a meta questions about that questions: What's the best way to deal with orphaned questions with partial or wrong answers?. I've asked a few such questions, usually when working with niche technologies or rare technology mixes.

The problem is that such questions have answers which either aren't helpful (the answer simply was not working), and there are no more answers even after half a year, or I've got an answer when I don't work with that framework for a year (project change, company change etc.). In my case, most of my questions were less niche, but someone who has mostly such questions could end up being ignored because "he's the egoist who doesn't care about accepting", which was very unjust.

So I'm grateful for removing accept rate from user profile. Citizenship idea is quite nice, but the criteria are quite fuzzy.

Instead, we could create user involvement rate. Involvement rate means if someone cares about other people's work. It means reaction to the answer. How can I react:

• accepting answer
• upvoting answer
• downvoting answer
• commenting answer

The last would be the most appropriate in my case. If something is not working for me, but I know it could be solution by other people, because it sound reasonable, I don't want to upvote or downvote, but I leave comment that unfortunately it is not working for me.

If I can't test it because I don't have access to the old project or environment, I can answer that unfortunately I can't test it.

But the most important is, if I care about other people's answer by reacting to them. You know, as answerer, that someone has read and analysed what you have written. It makes you feel you're doing something important for other people.

Answer 15

Two observations come to mind:

1. It appears as though active users that have higher accept rates, have them because the person asking the question will take the first response that unblocks them from the problem. So frequently the accepted answer tends to be very short and not frequently 100% correct.
2. The fully correct answer eventually boils to the top, but it is never marked as accepted. This could be months to years later when an authority on the subject - not someone terribly active - responds to a question. And then add the time it takes for the answer to be up voted.

So there are three problems as I see it that need to be addressed:

1. Not all answers were created equal. Partial answers are common. Authoritative answers are more rare. The person asking the question rarely goes back to mark the authoritative answer as the accepted answer.
2. Not all accepted answers are complete - they're only good enough to get a user unblocked with respect to their current problem. At the time the person asking the question gets their first answer, they don't have any perspective for what the realm of possible answers could be.
3. Not all people asking questions have the wherewithal to understand a correct answer vs. just the answer that will get them unblocked. Similarly, the user asking the question may not care about the health of the community.

The accepted rate has a few problems because it only rewards two of the three roles involved in answering and asking questions:

1. Asks questions - currently rewarded when marking a question as accepted
2. Answer a question quickly - currently rewarded when marking a question as accepted
3. Answer a question authoritatively after an answer has been accepted - And there's the rub

So here are my thoughts re: how to solve this particular problem, with the above as my frame of mind:

• Allow multiple answers to be marked as accepted, either by the community ("candidate answer") or the asker. "This is an answer, but not the answer." Up votes are free, but marking an answer as a "candidate answer" costs rep, like asking a question with a bounty.
• Setup a reminder to nag an asker to review partially accepted answers. If the reviewer doesn't mark the candidate question as a "viable answer," the users get their bounty back (an "abstain"). If the user has their question accepted, they get 2x the rep back, plus a "viable answer" tally. If an asker rejects a question, the user looses their rep.
• A different member of the community (not necessarily the respondent) can submit a response using their reputation.
• Interacting with "candidate questions" gives the asker some kind of rep bump for doing the right thing.
• Of "viable answers", there can be an "authoritative answer" flag that can be shifted around between "candidate answers."
• Askers should have the ability to delegate responsibility for what's a viable vs authoritative to the community.

re: that last point: maybe add a points per tag system. "I have N points for the PostgreSQL tag, therefore I can interact with questions tagged PostgreSQL, but I can't necessarily answer questions regarding Flash." It seems that this would solve a few problems.

As for the UI, it'd be nice if there was a mouse-over for a user's avatar that would show their authoritative/viable accept rates and the relevant tags for those answers (or a metagroup - database vs CSS vs ...)

Bottom line: the citizenship/activity level is currently already scored using rep. Accept rate, however, needs an extra dimension - hopefully the above is good food for thought.

Cheers.

Answer 16

This citizenship level seems to be intended to solve a problem that I don't think was the primary problem with displaying accept rate. The specificity of accept rate may have been a minor issue, but I think the real issue was it provided a metric to the community but lacked a way for the community to provide negative feedback other than comments which were then deemed to be rude. If this citizenship level doesn't include a nice way for users to say become a better citizen they will say it in comments.

These comments would not be at all similar to increase your rep comments which don't really occur. We currently don't see "increase your rep" comments for two main reasons. The first is rep is not something the user can directly affect by their own actions, other users must deem them worthy of a rep increase. The second is closely related, users are able to affect each others rep through votes to say whether a particular user's posts are worthy of gaining rep.

A citizenship score would be similar to accept rate in that its value is controlled almost exclusively by the individual, not the community. If you want to create more systems to encourage participation, you need to build ways for the community to feel they have some level of control over them or you will see the same comments, because that is the only option available to the community to exert control.

Answer 17

I think showing only reputation on questions is fine. When I'm deciding whether to spend time on a question, I consider things like:

• Is it understandable?
• Do I already know the answer?
• How extensive an answer (plus possible research effort) does it need?
• Am I interested in the answer for myself?

If the answer will require significant effort and doesn't interest me, only then might I care whether this is a user deserving of that effort by virtue of their own contributions.

The accepted answer rate doesn't help with any of these. Reputation gives me some warm fuzzy that the user won't abandon their question, in addition to a measure of their contributions to the site, without differentiating contributions of good questions, good answers, or site maintenance.

As such, reputation is also a reasonably good metric for awarding powers (comment, edit, etc).

Before introducing a citizenship score separate for reputation, someone needs to answer "If something matters so much, shouldn't it count toward earning powers?" If the answer is always yes, the reputation is the only citizenship score we need.

Where I'd like to see a metric other than reputation is on answers. Reputation doesn't tell me anything whatsoever about how trustworthy an answer is, simply because reputation draws from so many sources. On an answer, it would be useful (and especially so to newer users) to see:

• Does the user have badges on THIS TAG?
• Is the user getting upvotes (and not downvotes) for other answers on THIS TAG?
• If a combination of tags is popular enough, look at score on that combination particularly.

Questions aren't authoritative. Answers need to be. Put the metric of expertise on the answers. (And no, I'm not suggesting that acceptance rate is a measure of expertise, nor does the "good citizen" score appear to be one)

Answer 18

Citizenship, to me, implies well-rounded-ness in the use of Stack Overflow. Not only do you ask questions, you accept answers, you write new answers, you edit, you review, etc.

So, what else is well-rounded? Delicious pie, of course! Or cake, if you prefer.

I propose showing a wheel on a user's profile, with wedges that are representative of the user's activity in a particular area of the site. Once you've performed some quantum of activity in that particular category, you are granted the wedge. A similar feature was introduced on Kickstarter last year, where you collect a wedge for supporting a project in each category. Classically, of course, it takes inspiration from collecting wedges in Trivial Pursuit.

You could use more saturated colours for higher activity levels in a category, or make it a simple binary. You could have a count on the number of activities in a wedge, for example, you wouldn't get the question wedge until you've asked a certain number of questions, or accepted answers for them, or upvoted/edited them, or earned a certain number of question-related badges, or some combination of all of the above.

I don't believe it would dilute the existing systems, as it would be more about displaying the existing badges/reputation gains in a more consolidated way (a meta-badge, if you will). For examples of categories, see the above list, or just about every other answer here.

I don't believe it would unfairly penalize active contributors, as I've rarely seen a contributor that hasn't asked a single question. Even so, there needn't be specific question and answer categories - a content category could cover both ways of contributing content to the site. Other answers with useful categories: badp, lechlukasz, and even the original post.

But most importantly, it would help give new users a sense of the broader goals of the site. The current collection of badges is fairly useful in that sense, but there is an overwhelming number of them, in alphabetical order. Which is fine if you're looking for criteria on a specific badge, but not so great if you're trying to find out which badges are for good answers (for example).

Answer 19

I would be fine with some nebulous klout-like calculation of global SE "kudos" that would apply across all your activities on the network, and would hopefully be constantly made more sophisticated in terms of measuring in a rich, deep and vivid way, of your role within the community -- it might be related to the quality of particular activities and contributions (but would be weighted towards those actions and contributions that are for whatever reason "most wanted" by the community.)

To some degree reputation accomplishes half of this -- it can function more like a global reputation exchange, which gives a certain kind of raw quantitative scale. But the problem is that it becomes purely vertical. I'd definitely welcome a recognition of more "horizontal" civic SE effort -- maybe something like a 0-1k "karma credit" score.

Answer 20

In the interest of maintaining functionality until a citizenship level is added, I have created the following script:

function getPercentage(user, totalanswered, totalaccepted, min, max) {
    min =  min || 1;
    totalanswered = totalanswered || 0;
    totalaccepted = totalaccepted || 0;

    var percentage = 0;

    $.ajax({
        url: "/users/" + user + "?tab=questions&sort=votes&page=" + min,
        type: "get",
        dataType: "html",
        async: false,
        success: function(data) {
            var jdata = $(data);

            max = max || jdata.find(".page-numbers").length - 1;

            if (isNaN(max)) {
                max = min;
            }

            var answered = jdata.find(".answered").length;
            var accepted = jdata.find(".answered-accepted").length;
            totalanswered += answered;
            totalaccepted += accepted;

            min++;

            if (min > max) {
                percentage = totalaccepted / (totalaccepted + totalanswered);
            } else {
                percentage = getPercentage(user, totalanswered, totalaccepted, min, max);
            }
        }
    });

    return percentage
}

$(".owner > .user-info > .user-details").append("<div style='color: #700'>Accept Rate: " + (Math.round(getPercentage($(".owner > .user-info > .user-details > a").attr("href").substr(7)) * 100)) + "%</div>");

Or you can use it as a bookmarklet, by copying it and pasting it into a js minifier, then a bookmarklet generator like the one at http://chris.zarate.org/bookmarkleter

I would have posted the bookmarklet itself here, but SO doesn't allow javascript links.

For ease of adding this yourself, I have put a link in a jsFiddle that you can just drag into your bookmark bar: http://jsfiddle.net/zxkPk/1/

Answer 21

On the rare occasion that I looked at accept rate (because I seem to have a blind spot; maybe that makes me a Good Citizen) it wasn't because the question was good. It helped me decide on whether the asker of a godawful question was worth the effort of trying to help them improve it, and I think that was a good thing to have.

If you want to pursue this further (which seems in doubt, given the feedback here - most of which I agree with) then perhaps this aspect would be a more useful metric for a "secondary rep" than the be-all "citizenship" concept.

In other words, devise a metric which focuses on respect for answerers and their time and effort.

It could include the following, although some of them are dubious.

• Voluntarily removed questions with negative vote
• Closed or migrated questions (negative score!?)
• Accept rate
• Flags (negative score!?)
• Long comment threads which refuse migration to chat (negative score!?)
• On the other hand, "responds to comments", while not very focused, might be a useful counter-measure

Maybe only display the result if it's positive? I.e. let the absence of a "nice buddy star" mark a user as a potential waste of your time and spirits, as it were.

Because most of these are hard to remedy, I would like to see a time cap of some sort. Because some users visit only rarely, a fixed time window isn't very good; so maybe calculate it on their last 30 "active" visits or something like that. (I dont't know what exactly "active" means but just logging in and passively reading the site shouldn't count.)

Still not sure how new users should be tackled. They're a problem in any system which bases judgments on previous actions, anyhow. I suppose "innocent until proven guilty" would work here, especially in combination with the low rep of new users.

Answer 22

I think this a very good idea for the reason given; it promotes good behavior while at the same time aligning with (in my belief) basic psychology.

I like that whole altruistic notion that it's all about the question and if the question is good than it's reward enough to answer it and to contribute to the quality of the site. The problem is that I don't think it holds water. If I honestly look at myself, I answer questions for three reasons:

• The satisfaction of helping another person (samaritan)
• Increase my standing in the community (vanity)
• I enjoy the challenge (recreation)

Improving the quality of the SO and the value for future users does not motivate me one bit. Firstly, StackOverflow is an abstract concept, a thing, so I get no samaritan satisfaction in helping it. Secondly, I have no stake in SO. Increasing the overall value of the site and the repository of questions and knowledge gives nothing back to me and does not activate any of my basic motivators.

However, by giving me an arena (or a playing-field) where my motivators can be engaged, great value can be generated for the site. But that is an effect of my behavior, not a primary motivation for it.

Because of this, the quality of the question is equally important to the perceived quality of the questioner. If someone posed an interesting question but I perceived that person as a "bad member" or less deserving of my help, I might still answer the question just to get some community recognition (i.e. up-votes) but I would not put my best effort into it. I would get no samaritan satisfaction in helping someone "undeserving". A good question from a "good citizen" however hits all my motivators and triggers me to make a better contribution myself.

And I have a strong belief that my attitude is shared by a great portion of SO's users.

EDIT: People are going to pass judgement on questioners regardless. The question is, does StackOverflow want to influence what they base their judgement on, or not? Take away all quantifiable information (e.g. answer history, past behavior etc), and judgement will be based on non-quantifiable (and/or possibly irrational) factors, like spelling, username and so on. And I think that would be worse, plus a missed opportunity to promote general behavior in a desired direction.

Answer 23

I agree that there should be an alternate metric, but most of your general citizenship idea is not useful since this site is mainly a Q/A website. So, the primary purpose of a new metric should be to improve answer quality, and to promote wise allocation of time in answering questions. Since everyone's time is limited, spending it on less useful questions implies that you have given up the opportunity of answering questions that you could answer better. Therefore, when you design a new metric, it should try to match the right people to the right questions!

From this point of view, I think the following metric would be useful:

• Reputation: Quantifies how much work a person has put in this website
• Activeness: Quantifies how active they are in the last 30 days
• Responsiveness: Quantifies whether the OP takes care of their own question, using any form of response, including upvote, downvote (!), accept, or comment on the answers.

The last two metrics are very important motivation for me to give an answer here. Those two metric are not shown now, but I know that the OP (@Jeff) must give me responses and in a short time and therefore I am writing my answer here. There are already twenty answers here so most people will not read this answer. If the OP does not even read and give me any responses, there is no point for me write this answer, right? Even if I have good answer.

---

Let me elaborate why I think these metrics are helpful. The value of a question certainly is determined solely by the question itself. However, I will only spend a certain amount of time to read it, unless it is written by a reputable person (more likely to be valid), or a responsive person so that I can ask them to clarify.

As an answerer, if the question is very esoteric (and maybe useful) that only small group of people understand and have interest in it, I would consider to answer it only if the asker would give me a reply, since the OP might be the only audience that would read my answer! Another situation is old questions with answers. Even though the question itself are good and I know a better answer, I might answer it only if OP is active and will give me a reply. Otherwise, the question will pop up in the front page, the top rated answers get upvoted and the new answers at the bottom stay there without ever being seen, so pathetically.

As a learner, I would only read those answers that get a response, written by high rep user or with the clear answer in the first few lines.

Showing this data would allow us to decide how to spend our time answering questions. The removal of the accepted rate already prevents people from wasting time. Now you should give them information on how to allocate their time more wisely.

---

Some replies to other comments here:

What is the desired effect of it. Say we have a broader metric visible to others. What should I do, or how should my behaviour change if I stumble upon someone who is not acting responsibly? ..." – @Bart

You should move on to the next question. Just don't waste your time commenting if the poster is not active anymore. If the OP is not responsible and there is a long list of answers, please don't add new answer because no one will see it.

I don't mind having this, but it should not be displayed on questions. The quality of a question can be determined by reading it. Knowing more about the asker should not change your vote - @Manishearth

I agree that the quality of question is determined by itself, and extra information would not change my vote. But it would change the time I am willing to read it and answer it.

What is more useful to the longer term health of a community: a single ok question, or an engaged community member who assists and participates - @Jeff

Both, but not all people are willing to participate in both of them. Also, most information does not help any questions and answers, which you consider the first class citizen, at all. I would also suggest you to remove those blade counts because it is already correlated with reputation, the details blade are important though. I am in favor of the information being put on their user page.

Remark: The Activeness and Responsiveness involves information that is not in public so it is much more helpful the user page. You can put a high rating on accepted answer to motivate them to accept more answers.

Answer 24

The problem that I see with the new proposed metric, it wants to replace a metric that was exclusively used for judging questions with a general-purpose metric. We've already got a general-purpose metric, two metrics are just confusing, not useful. So I'm concentrating on a useful metric to replace the Accept Rate.

Reputation measures excellence, any chance the new metric will measure mediocrity?

Reputation is absolutely awesome for a couple of reasons:

• Allows one to "grow" it's reputation doing the thing they're good at. Let good askers ask and let good answerers answer. Let the native English speakers with a knack for proper english do the editing.
• The really high reputation goes to the ones answering questions. This might sound elitist, but it's fine that way; It's a Q&A site, answering questions drives the site, not asking or editing.

Since the new "citizenship" meter can't possibly weight in the exact same way as reputation, yet it wants to measure everything, there's a good chance it's going to be a measure of MEDIOCRITY. One'll get a good score if one does a little of everything. If it's any other way it will either raise with up-votes (and then it'll look exactly like reputation), or it will not and then it will be far worst then mediocre, it'll end up promoting everything but votes.

Any new measurment we do get should help Askers understand if the questions they ask are good or bad

This is a Q&A site and it's measure of excellence lays exclusively with the question and answers. Everything else is just an aid: edits and flags are nice, but they'll be useless without good questions and smart answers.

I do approve of a new metric, used the same way as the old "accept rate", but one that measures the pertinent factors in what makes a good QUESTION and nothing else:

1. Are the question properly researched, written in a proper way and in accordance to the site FAQ?
2. Is the asker actively answering to questions from the answerers?
3. Is the asker argumentative in comments?
4. Does the asker accept answers?

All those aspects of question asking can be determined using automated systems. (1) can be determined by examining question scores and question close-rate. (2) can be determined by measuring the time it takes for the answer to answer anything in comments. (3) Is a bit more difficult but very important, because it erodes the morale of answerers. We're all p****d with smug users that are so much smarter then us yet somehow need to ask a question. (4) Is related to (2) and it's a way to measure user involvement.

When asking a question, those elements are not interesting:

• Does the user vote?

  Useless and very dangerous. Let the Askers know that votes count, and they'll vote, and there vote will only represent there desire to get a better score so they attract better answers.

• Does the user answer questions?

  I'd say this poses a small danger as well. Example: If I'd ever show up on the english stack exchange I'd surely exclusively ask questions, because I know I'm not the right person to answer anything there. Do you think that'll work for SuperUser or StackOverflow? Any chance we'd get dummy answers because one needs to have answers for the score? Less of a danger since bad answers are promptly downvoted.

• Does the user edit or suggest edits on questions?

  According to the last StackOverflow survery most users are not from native english speaking sites. Should users start editing questions simply because they need to improve the presumably visible citizienship score?

• Does the user flag stuff?

  Flagging is to many a "gray" area; On the one hand there's the theory of doing what you can yourself, without involving the moderators. Then there's the (un)desire of some to become a "snitch". Think of all the ex-comunist country members where "snitching" has a particularly bad history attached. I just don't see how this should be relevant to asking questions.

Answer 25

The gray rectangle in the bottom left corner is quite meaningless without the accept rate. It helps us to learn about the citizenship level of the OP. Because I like to be appreciated for sparing my time to give my suggestion to someone

Also it allows me to encourage other users to give their valuable answers to my questions by showing them Yes I have 100% accept rate. You will surely be valued if you could provide me with good answers

I am not saying this because I don't want to help the people with 0% accept rate. but what I think that is there should be loyality for the users who put their research to solve someone's problem.

What I have found is that most of the users only accepts answers, when they are asked to improve their accept rate. So at time, it's not shown on the posts, the users will not bother as much to accept the answers, somehow it could halt the good answers,

• Good answers will not get appreciation.
• It would be difficult to know which answer exactly solves the problem.

So I don't think it's a good idea to just remove the Accept rate from the posts without providing a good alternative for it.

Answer 26

If the end goal is to increase the amount of accepted answers, the straightforward way of accomplishing that is to award points for accepting answers.