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In many FPS multiplayer games, when you kill someone together with someone else, you get assist points, for example the first one who starts shooting gets 5 points, the helper gets 2. Would this be doable for Stack Exchange, where when you edit a question or answer, you get a small percentage of the score the original author of the answerer gets.

I can only see one problem with this, and that is the amount of improvement the edit made. For example, someone who added actual information to an answer instead of making his own, cluttering up the page more, should get more rep then someone just fixing some language errors.

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    +1 because I think it's an interesting idea, even though I do not think it's possible to implement successfully.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 17:34
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    could everyone who downvoted this question tell me why? Downvoting is meant to show that some question is a bad question, not to show that you disagree with an idea. Although I see 4 downvotes on my question, I see noboddy telling me that I made some mistake. btw, thx @jadarnel27
    – bigblind
    Commented Dec 14, 2011 at 16:11
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    Voting is different on meta (which was a surprise to me when I started posting on here). The dowvotes generally indicate people disagree with your [feature-request], not that they think the post is of low quality.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Dec 14, 2011 at 16:13
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    @jadarnel27 but then downvotes shouldn't be decreasing rep, because suggesting something that people disagree ith does not necessarily mean you did something wrong. At this point, I have a question ban on my account, with a reputation of 95 because I made a few mistakes when I started out heere. I'm not going to bother emailing to stackexchange to ask to lift the ban, I'll just try to get better at answering here first, but imho, people disagreeing with you shouldn't cause such a ban.
    – bigblind
    Commented Dec 14, 2011 at 16:19
  • Are those your only two questions on meta, or have some been deleted?
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Dec 14, 2011 at 16:35
  • as far as I remember, those are the only one. If there was one deleted, it can be at most one.
    – bigblind
    Commented Dec 14, 2011 at 16:39

2 Answers 2

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The motivation for editing is not to steal reputation from other users. In most cases, you shouldn't really be adding any new information that is not already available in the question/answer or its comments, and therefore you're not really "contributing" anything to that question/answer. The point of editing is to improve your community with proper formatting, grammar, titles, tags, etc. to make it easier to understand and find the questions and answers that would help others in the same situation.

I make tons of edits per day which are just adding 4, 8, 12, 16 spaces in the post for proper code formatting. How is that possibly worthy of leeching reputation from the original poster?

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    I think the @Frederik means that the editor would get "bonus" rep; the editee would still get all the rep they normally would.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 17:37
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    @jadarnel27: If you don't have edit privileges, you already get 2 reputation, up to 1000 reputation. That's all the reputation you need.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 17:38
  • Oh, I agree 100%. I was just pointing out that I don't think "stealing" rep was the OP's intent here.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 17:51
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Differentiating a helpful edit from a fluff edit would be next to impossible to do without flat-out asking the original author "was this edit helpful?". As a result I think this idea is implausible at best.

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  • Indeed. And then it would just be another people would try to game the system. +1.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 17:35
  • it's sad but true.
    – bigblind
    Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 17:39

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