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Honestly, I feel handicapped not being able to edit other people's posts here on Meta (and until recently could not even retag questions).

Why does our hard-earned reputation on SO not count in Meta?

There are already a lot of questions that need editing, and there are practically no users (aside from the mods) that can do that at the moment.

The should users be able to edit others' posts question itself contains so many spelling and grammatical errors that it's down right irritating not being able to edit it (on SO it would have been cleaned up in two seconds).

There should definitely be some conversion rate - or at least just carry over the privileges, if not the rep itself.

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    Give it a few days (if not less for some users) and you'll already have people with moderation ability. – TheTXI Jul 1 '09 at 13:24
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    I feel rather handicapped about this as well. And the issue isn't just on SO, either. – Isiah Meadows Mar 1 '14 at 21:23
41

I don't buy into the whole "trusted by SO and not by META" line of thinking.

Which skills exactly are lacking in a SO user with 10K rep to justify not letting him edit on Meta? Privileges that come with rep are just a way of making sure you have enough experience and familiarity with the system before you interfere with it.

So I honestly don't see the danger in letting high rep users from SO carry over their privileges to Meta. Can someone give an example of a reasonable scenario that demonstrates why a user might be trusted on SO but not trusted on Meta?

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    Indeed. I don't care about rep transfer, but I think privileges should be shared across the sites. – xmm0 Jul 2 '09 at 23:36
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    On some StackExchange sites, users have the same reputation on meta and parent site. The difference between those sites, and meta.stackoverflow.com is that meta.stackoverflow.com is the meta site for more than one site. – kiamlaluno Aug 24 '10 at 21:29
  • -1. "Can someone give an example of a reasonable scenario that demonstrates why a user might be trusted on SO but not trusted on Meta?" I can. There's a whole FAQ page full of such reasons! – Pops Sep 2 '10 at 18:58
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    You dilute your message by answering and accepting your own question! – David Heffernan Feb 19 '11 at 23:07
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    I want to upvote your answer, but I do not have 15 reputation. I have 168 on the main site, but apparently I cannot be trusted with upvoting an answer on meta. – Masked Man Dec 7 '12 at 12:42
14

In the new world:

Each site's meta (other than this one) is designed for site-specific discussions about things like:

  • Defining a site's culture
  • Determining each site's tolerance for certain types of questions
  • Discussing tagging practices, moderators, etc.

And on those sites, it makes more sense for the meta site rep to mirror the parent site rep, since the most "trust" to define the site's culture should be assigned to those that have earned the most trust on the site itself; they are its culture.

This site, meta.SO, continues to serve that role of discussing the culture and goals of StackOverflow.com (and that of Area 51,) but it also serves an important larger need:

It is also the meta site for discussion of the unified engine that will drive both the trilogy sites and the SE 2.0 sites, addressing things like:

  • Bugs
  • Feature Requests
  • Questions about the system as a whole (ads, rep-gaming gaps, re-posting policy, etc.)

On a site about the engine, it does not make as much sense to make the reputation mirror one or some of the other sites. Being an expert in cooking does not make you a more trustworthy improver of a great Q&A network (although you are more trusted than someone who's never used the system, which is why you start with 100 rep for association).

Eventually, it may make sense to pull the part of this site that is about SO-specific cultural or topical issues out of the cross-network-engine-focused site, so that SO's "cultural" Meta system more closely matches the approach of the other sites, (and so the engine needs of a mature site don't drown out the potentially different engine needs of younger sites,) but it definitely doesn't make sense to do so today, for this reason:

The only long-term users of the system today are from SO. They're the "expert" critical mass that's needed to weigh in and opine on things like the way that an apparently good proposal for the engine won't work well in practice, etc.

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8

If anything, I think privileges should carry from MetaSO, to the other sites.

If you have a high score here, then that means you want to make the system better. So then you are more likely to want to edit posts that could be better, but you may not be active enough on the other sites to be able to gain enough rep to fix those posts.

I know that one of my favorite things to do are to fix posts that aren't using Markdown effectively, or adding links to further information about those posts.

If anything having a higher score on MetaSO, than the other sites, means you are more likely to fix a post, than post yet another answer, that is slightly more accurate.

There was one question on ServerFault, that I would have added a link to the information the poster was referring to, but all I could do was to post a comment with a link.

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    This is now a historical answer, as you can now propose edits at any level of reputation. – Brad Gilbert Jun 27 '12 at 4:15
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In one way I want to say yes (Meta should be the combination of -all- your individual rep scores), but at the same time I realize that would not work either.

If someone has 1,000 rep on one site, 1,000 rep on another site, and 1,000 rep on the third site, that would make them have 3,000 rep, which is much greater in terms of privileges allowed by their normal usage.

Thomas also makes the good point that your scores on the individual sites should not be taken as an indicator necessarily of how well you perform on Meta (the same as your score on SO doesn't factor into your score on SF).

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    So just take the maximum repuation - i.e. 1,000. If I've got 5K on StackOverflow and 150 on ServerFault, then give me 5K. If I've got 350 on ServerFault and 100 on StackOverflow then give me 350. – BenAlabaster Jul 2 '09 at 22:27
  • What if I've got a high score on Moms 4 Mom? – Adamski Jun 2 '10 at 13:50
  • FWIW, @TheTXI posted a similar answer to a similar question. – Pops Sep 2 '10 at 18:55
4

No. Just because you are trusted by SO to ask and answer programming/software engineering questions doesn't mean you should be trusted by MSO to ask and answer SO questions.

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  • Marc, your edit makes no sense as the questions on SO are programming/software engineering questions while the questions here are SO questions, or questions about SO. I'm rolling back. – Thomas Owens Jul 1 '09 at 12:29
  • s/answer SO questions/answer questions about SO/ – Peter Ajtai Sep 2 '10 at 18:52
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    @TO - But you're not trusted to edit questions and fix grammatical errors? Are grammar errors on MSO somehow mysteriously different and elusive than the grammar errors on SO itself? The OP wasn't talking about asking/answering questions; we all can do that with double-digit reputation. – jmort253 Feb 14 '11 at 4:48

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