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]
votesSimilar 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
ssl
tag. Most of the things I answer now, I knew them when I joined SO with my little 1 rep score (I've learnt a few things since, but not that much). If I had only been able to participate in questions for low-rep users, I probably would have been bored soon and never made it to the higher rep corner. – Bruno May 8 '12 at 20:13