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Possible Duplicate:
How does “Reputation” work?

It sounds a little silly, but I used to think that when I ask a question and get an answer by a member with high reputation, that reputation actually represents a lot of knowledge, experience, etc.. But I found out that many members have a huge reputation just because they asked very basic questions (some of them got 800 votes and more for 1 question.), while at the same time contributed less than 5 answers which got hardly 1 or 2 votes.

On the other hand, a lot of people spend time and efforts to answer questions (sometimes very good answers) and get only few votes , if any.

I think that every question/answer should be restricted to something like 10 votes max, but until then:

What is the purpose of Stack Overflow reputation (by its current score system )?

This is not a duplicated question. I know how reputaion works (how much reputation you get for each action/vote ...) I just don't understand the purpose of it (through its current score system that doesn't restrict the number of votes one could get for simple question/ or answer...)

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  • 2
    Or: "What is the purpose of reputation on meta stackoverflow?"
    – user156108
    Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 14:25
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    Seems this question could get many votes, and that in turn should bring you a lot of reputation. Was that the plan? ;-)
    – cabecao
    Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 14:27
  • please stop voting up this question. it is not my intention!
    – yoav barnea
    Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 14:31
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    I was just kidding, don't worry.
    – cabecao
    Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 14:35
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    Also the faq describes it pretty well. Reputation is a rough measurement of how much the community trusts you, not as you put it a representation a lot of knowledge, experience
    – Some Helpful Commenter
    Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 15:11
  • so you suggest that if one is asking how to check if string contains a substring , and this person get 800 votes for that question- does this mean that the cummunity trust him?
    – yoav barnea
    Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 15:17
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    @yoav welcome to Meta! You're asking the right questions. :) This is actually a long discussion, see e.g. Do some users have too much rep? there's plenty of things one could do to address the issue, and much has been done, but the general consensus is that being too radical in trying to fix this would do a lot of damage elsewhere.
    – Pekka
    Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 16:12

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