The bikeshed problem and Stack Exchange

Question

In short, the bikeshed problem:

If you go before the Board of Directors and ask for 1.5 billion dollars to build a nuclear reactor, no one will review or discuss the details of the plant. They will assume that experts have been over every inch of the plans, and not want to look foolish by asking a silly question.

However, if you ask the same group to approve a 30 dollar expenditure for lumber with which to build a bikeshed (presumably a British term for the smallest possible building) then be prepared for a 45 minute discussion about all aspects of the bikeshed, including the color of the paint. The explanation for this is that everyone can grasp the scale of a bikeshed.

To transform this problem to Stack Overflow terms, questions that are trivial such as "How to convert a C string to a QString or "What is the difference between . and ->" get a lot more views, answers and votes than real questions of the form "How do I frob this widget" that bother real professionals. Fewer views mean less possible votes for good answers and hence less incentive for people to answer.

How can Stack Exchange solve this problem?

Answer 1

Chess doesn't have this problem

Chess has the Chess rating system. If a grandmaster beats a newbie, then he only gets little score (and the newbie loses little), because it was a trivial game. But if a newbie beats a grandmaster, the change of score is massive because that means the newbie might've had an excellent game. On SE, this might translate to:

who's asking -> || newbie      | grandmaster    |
who's answering ||             |                |
      v         ||             |                |
================++=============+================+
newbie          || as today    | answer gets    |
                ||             | lots of points |
----------------++-------------+----------------+
grandmaster     || answer gets | as today       |
                || few points  |                |

Or, in other words, not all questions are equal, not all answers are equal. That's also what I. J. Kennedy says in his answer.

Note I've had this similar question: Is it OK for Stack Exchange to treat all questions / answers equally?

Answer 2

How can SE solve this problem?

From the very beginning, I've thought SE should weight upvotes by the reputation of the voter. In fact for a while, I just assumed that's the way it worked, it seemed so natural. An upvote from Jon Skeet is more meaningful than one from noobee1knoobee. I think a system like that would do wonders to alleviate the infamous bikeshed problem. The actual weight of an upvote should probably be something like the logarithm of the repution of the upvoter. Over time, I believe this system would converge to the "right" scores for questions and answers, which should be the objective, right?

Answer 3

real questions of the form "How do I frob this widget"

I disagree with Shog9.

Here's a frob this widget question from me that is both, not a paint shed question, and something that I really need help to answer.

The problem is, there are 400 questions something along the lines of.

Importing best practices

• What are good rules of thumb for Python imports?
• Should Python import statements always be at the top of a module?
• Python import coding style
• Python - when is ‘import’ required?
• What is philosophy of using import in Python?
• Python importing

Still best practices - importing in the middle of a file

• Good or bad practice in Python: import in the middle of a file
• Local import statements in Python
• Is it pythonic to import inside functions?
• How to import a module given the full path?

How are 'import module' and 'from module import *'

Or, why is 'from module import *' bad

• *In Python, what exactly does “import ” import?
• ‘import module’ or ‘from module import’
• from X import a versus import X; X.a
• Properly importing modules in Python
• How to import a module given the full path?
• Python: How can I import all variables?
• What’s the purpose of “import package”?

Pertaining to cyclic imports

• Circular (or cyclic) imports in Python
• Detecting circular imports
• Python initialization and circular reference counts
• Should I worry about circular references in Python?
• Circular dependency in Python
• Do all dynamic languages have the circular import issue?
• Circular import dependency in Python

These are the five base cases, now mix and match every permutation of these questions until you get 400 unique questions and you now have 400 bikesheds sitting between the highly experienced/talented Stack Overflow users and my hard/impossible question to answer.

Edit: So 400 is an obvious exaggeration. So, to demonstrate I added links. Welcome to bikeshed-land. If you don't see a common theme I'll give you a hint. It rhymes with rubjective. We're talking about low hanging fruit here and a lot, if not most of those question have 5+ upvotes.

Update

Removed the 'canonical' jargon (as Jeff Atwood has steered me down the correct path on that topic in a different post) and 'ranty' examples not related to the topic.

Answer 4

How can SE solve this problem?

SE solves this problem by featuring questions for a cost in reputation. They are called bounties, and will put the question in a list of featured questions, with the incentive that good a good answer will receive a larger reputation boost than normal.

Answer 5

real questions of the form "How do I frob this widget"

Frobbing widgets is a trivial application of any of a number of general-purpose frobbing techniques. Anyone who has picked up an introductory programming book will know the advantages and disadvantages of each, and anyone who has reached adulthood without undergoing a full frontal lobotomy will need only a casual glance at the relevant widget interface in order to write up a custom frob function.

Therefore, these questions get relatively little attention because they offer nothing of interest to most readers. Hardly filling the role of the Nuclear Reactor in your analogy, they are perhaps a better match for the movements of a painter's arm as he holds the brush applying the committee-chosen paint to the new bikeshed.

Fortunately, SO has the equivalent of occupational therapists... and, perhaps, brush-stroke fetishists... to answer these questions.

Answer 6

Train more experts so more people can grasp the concept of more complex problems. Which SE is doing by sharing knowledge.

Answer 7

Offer a bounty for your question. It's not up to SE (as a service) to get answers to your tough question. It's up to the community. Make it worth the time to look up and research (and test if it's code or something that requires testing).

As for bike shed questions, I've personally started voting them down (when it's the really obviously basic type. Otherwise, find a duplicate, etc). It's okay to vote down bad questions, it's what it's for.

Answer 8

Views don't help your question be answered. Views from domain experts are what helps your non-bikeshedding questions get answered.

Forget about reputation, hide tags that have too much noise, use good tags, and ignore the din.

Answer 9

_{I'm guessing someone has already suggested it in other contexts, but}

I wish we could separate two kinds of 'upvote wishes':

• "Hey, I just had the exact same problem as you, dude!" ... as opposed to
• "This question is thought-provoking, well-presented, promotes useful discussion etc."

Answer 10

Either

• try to build your own subcommunity that cares about your interest (tagging is important here)

or

• forget about Stack Overflow and use a much more specialized website

In both cases, you shouldn't consider reputation important at all (it looked as a good idea at first, but now I think that it was bad: how many forums have reputation? How many have reputation points-farming questions and answers?) Anyway, I recommend the first approach (and remember: forget reputation, you won't gain many digits, and it doesn't matter).

Answer 11

I take some issues with this question. I think it's framing things in a way that is misleading.

questions that are trivial such as "How to convert a C string to a QString or "What is the difference between . and ->" get a lot more views, answers and votes than real questions of the form "How do I frob this widget" that bother real professionals.

1. I don't see a significant fundamental difference between the forms of the examples you gave. And from the rest of what you say about fewer views and votes, it sounds like what you're really describing a difference about is (at least partially) usefulness.

2. I wouldn't call these questions "trivial". Something trivial for an expert can be deep to a beginner. In other words, "triviality" is hard to pin down to something that is the same for everyone. Instead, I'd just say it as how I see what it is that you've described: "relatively-common" questions.

3. Who says "real professionals" don't ask those relatively-common questions? By definition, a common question is one that many people will have at some point in their journey of learning.

   And who says a "real professional" doesn't need reminding of the answers to common (and even simple or basic-appearing) questions? You probably know what I'm talking about- those questions where you find it hard to remember the answer because it's not very intuitive, and you keep having to ask the question and read the answer again.

   What is a "real professional" anyway? I don't like this gatekeeping language. Are you saying some professionals are illegitimate? And upon what basis? Whether they at some point in their lives ask a common question? Even if people like that exist that have never asked a common question about their field in their life, I don't see how that is something particularly worthy of praise, and even if it were, why it should be something worthy of extra reward on this site, which was not built to make them happy, but to build a knowledge base for everyone.

   And why do you think that whatever this "real professional" class is should be catered to more than the rest of the site's designated audience? A reminder that (at least at one point), Stack Overflow's welcome/front-page (or something along those lines) said something to the effect of it being a site for professional and enthusiast programmers. Even if it no longer says that, the idea it was getting at still holds true. When did we all become okay with this gatekeeping / classism? Or did nobody notice it hiding in the question?

Once you frame the difference as one of commonality of questions and widespread-ness of usefulness (I think it's quite logical to say that they correlate) then you'll see that this is not- as far as the system in its mechanics is concerned- an issue at all. Usefulness is one of the primary recommended qualifiers of usage of upvote and downvote buttons given in their tooltips. Usefulness is one of the primary goals of the knowledge base we're building.

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Fewer views mean less possible votes for good answers and hence less incentive for people to answer.

Says who and for who? Not everyone who is here is playing a game to get magic internet points. Some people just like helping people using their expertise. Not that that necessarily leads to behaviours that are in the best interest of the site ecosystem, but the point stands.

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Now, do I think it's a great thing that in some sense, unilaterally, answers to more common questions- regardless of the level of expertise required or demonstrated in or by the answer- get more votes (and therefore reward more reputation) compared to questions which get fewer views, votes, and therefore give fewer magic internet points to the answerer?

No.

But I have come to see and understand the reputation system as one that is not a measure of expertise, but of usefulness of contributed content, and if you choose to understand it that way (because it seems that that is not what the Help Center or FAQs currently explain it as), then everything about how some people have more or less reputation falls into place for the most part (besides voting fraud and serial voting).

Would I like it that when I write an answer that I think used/demonstrated more of my expertise, it get rewarded relatively more? Of course! But the system has never chosen to do that, and I accept that reality. Anyway- how would you evaluate something like that objectively? Recall my previous point that triviality is not something that everyone evaluates equally.

How can Stack Exchange solve this problem?

Bounties. In that sense, it's already solved. See a really great answer that tackles an uncommon question that you encountered and gives it great depth and illuminates the answer in an understandable way? Set a bounty and pick the option that says "reward an existing answer".