Create an “Experts View” of the SE sites for users interested in higher-level questions?

Question

Short version of proposal:

Provide us with a way to filter questions for more advanced or higher-quality questions, so we don't have to skim through the masses of beginner questions that exist if we don't want to.

---

Long version of proposal:

It seems like some SE sites are struggling to find the balance between maintaining a high quality Q&A site that will attract experts to answer questions, and a popular Q&A site that attracts users to ask questions

To quote one expert when answering why Literature failed,

On the one hand, the most popular topics - reccomendations, story identification, and reading order - seemed to me inconsequential and uninteresting. Their utility is obvious, but generally speaking, these are the opposite of expert questions. These are (usually) trivialities and everybody-can-answer questions. On a more active site with wider scope (e.g. SciFi), these questions might be a mere nuisance in my own opinion, but when they seem like the primary focus of the site, they drown it out. It becomes a site that discourages visitors who were hoping for more than that.

But at the same time the top answer to the question Is StackExchange supposed to be just for experts? is summarized by:

Stack Exchange is for getting answers to questions about actual problems you face. Your expert-level "status" is, with a few notable exceptions, irrelevant if you can explain your problem or help somebody else solve theirs.

But why should we have to choose between higher-quality questions that appeal to the small group of experts, or higher-traffic non-expert questions that appeal to the masses? Why not have both?

My proposal is to create an "Experts View" of the sites, which is basically just a filtered view (like the "hot" or "featured" views) of questions that only shows questions that will most likely interest people who want to discuss a topic at a higher level.

The algorithm wouldn't be perfect, but it should filter out most of the beginner level, common sense, general knowledge, and low-quality questions.

How we identify expert-level questions may need more discussion, however some examples I can think of would include:

• Questions asked by users that have over X reputation in the question tags

  The assumption is that if you've accumulated enough rep to be in this group, then you probably understand the basics of the subject matter and know how the SE sites work, so questions you ask should be of a higher quality

• Questions that have over X score

  This could be based on whatever algorithm SE uses to determine a "hot" question for the MultiCollider SuperDropdown, or it could simply be vote-based. I find that the algorithm which determines "hot" questions is pretty good at picking interesting questions, even if sometimes they're not always advanced questions.

• Maybe even questions that contain X [send to experts] votes

  Similar to the vote-to-close links, have a link available which basically says "this question is of a higher-level than we peons can understand, so send it to the experts to get a good answer on it" (you'd need sufficient rep to see link of course, or perhaps sufficient rep within the question tags). After X votes, a flag is set on the question and it shows up in the Expert filter.

All you would need is an IsExpert flag on the question table, a few triggers that set that flag once the question has been deemed "expert-worthy", and then just add a question view that filters for questions where IsExpert=1

Nothing would stop a user from answering these questions, regardless of their rep. The questions would still show up in all the other question lists, and work the exact same way any other question would. The only difference is users who have been around on the sites for a while and have gotten tired of answering newbie questions, or who are not interested in gaining rep or helping newbies, could filter the list for more advanced questions.

Experts are important to us, but so are the users that ask questions for the experts to answer. This would give the experts a place to go for the higher quality questions that would most likely interest them, while still providing a useful Q&A site for the rest of us who are simply learning and looking for answers.

Note: I've made some updates to the proposal which may invalidate some comments/answers below

Answer 1

I'm speaking predominantly as a Stack Overflow user here, so keep in mind that my view may be badly skewed.

Questions asked by users with over X reputation (or within the top X percent of users based on rep)

This would have to be based on tags, not overall reputation. I'm an expert in a handful of tags on SO, but have no business poking into others. It's also easy to gain reputation on some sites in "softball" tags where anyone can answer.

Questions that have over X score

This would not work on Stack Overflow at all, and scores would be badly skewed on any site when an easy question gets posted on reddit. This might be salvageable if you normalize for number of views.

Maybe even questions that contain X [send to experts] votes

This might work if only other experts could cast these votes.

Overall, I'm not convinced that a special area for experts is necessary. I think the real problem faced by new sites on broad topics like Literature is that not enough experts about the topic are experts at using Stack Exchange. It's fairly easy to ignore [recommendation], [story-identification], and [reading order] questions and only pay attention to those types of questions that you want to answer. I think better educating new users on how to use these tools would be a more worthwhile solution than trying to quantify expertise.

Answer 2

But why should we have to choose between higher-quality questions that appeal to the small group of experts, or higher-traffic non-expert questions that appeal to the masses? Why not have both?

Because an onslaught of non-expert questions leads inexorably to the next Yahoo Answers. If you can solve that problem, I'm all ears.

---

Behind all close reasons are some higher, but subjective principles: is this question interesting, clear and understandable, and helpful to future visitors of the site? Does the overall question base tend to attract experts or bikeshedders?

The real purpose for close reasons like "Not Constructive," is that questions having those characteristics tend to be subjectively terrible questions, and we can use "Not Constructive" as a reasonably objective metric to close.

This leads to two problems:

1. Some "Not Constructive" questions are genuinely well-written and interesting, even to the experts. How do you save these questions and keep them productive without giving the bikeshedders an excuse to ask theirs, and allowing the site to devolve into mindless banter?

2. Some questions that objectively meet all of the rules are genuinely uninteresting, or no effort has been put into them other than that needed to skirt the rules. How do you get these off the site?

If you could solve those two problems, you wouldn't need an expert distinction at all. In any case, I don't see how separating the question pools into the "haves" and "have nots" makes things better. All it does is push the problem to a different place.

Answer 3

That's been done, in the form of separate sites:

• Theoretical Computer Science, for research-level questions in theoretical computer science. A separate site from Computer Science.
• Theoretical Physics, for research-level questions in theoretical physics. A separate site from Physics.
• Both of the above were inspired from Math Overflow (originally a Stack Exchange 1.0 site), for research-level questions in mathematics. A separate site from Mathematics.

Theoretical Physics failed, ostensibly because it didn't manage to attain a sustainable level of activity. Both MO and TCS were already established when their general public counterpart came onto the scene, whereas TP started well after Physics.

I encourage you to read the many discussions on the respective metas of the research-level sites, on the merit of such sites. A significant number of users of research-level sites are not interested in the more general site (and vice versa, of course).

Mixing the advanced community and the general community wouldn't work well:

• Questions asked by top users by reputation: No, I'm one of the top users on CS currently, that doesn't mean I ask expert-level questions. Reputation is an indicator of activity far more than expertise; most of my CS reputation comes from didactic (I hope!) explanations of simple matters, not from expert answers to advanced questions.
• Questions that have over X score: having frequented Programmers, you're well aware that score is primarily an indicator of popularity, and that easy questions and easy answers tend to have far higher scores (“hey, I understand this, +1”).
• Send-to-expert votes: as in vote to migrate…

The separate audiences have different habits, different site policies, different ideas of what questions are answerable (the interpretation of “not constructive” and “not a real question” varies a lot between sites), different voting power… There is no mechanism to identify the expert questions; tagging wouldn't work, because these things spill over tags, and there's no real separation of audience between tags. You can't mix these different communities on the same site.

If you wish to create a more expert-level site with a topic similar to an existing site (or not), propose it on Area 51. You'll have to show very strongly that the site needs to exist, though: does your expert community really need a separate site? Are its needs not served by the existing site? Will there be a significant number of people on the expert site who have no interest in the generalist site?