I recently came across this post, which states (emphasis mine):
..The problem that became evident was that people who want to learn how to write a good question and people who can't write a good question are mutually exclusive groups.
- Eric
Naturally, I had to see if I could graph this, so I wrote this query on SEDE to get some data.
By defining users who can't write good posts (hereafter referred to as bad authors) as all users without a cumulative positive post score, but with at least one post, after a week of account creation, and users who want to write good posts (hereafter referred to as informed authors) as all authors who received either an Informed1 or Analytical2 badge within the same time period, I obtained (for SO) the following chart:
By my definition of bad and informed authors (which are narrow, I know, but the best I could think of possible with SEDE), the two groups are indeed almost mutually exclusive. In fact, on SO, only 3% of bad authors are also informed.
This is especially striking when comparing to users who can write good posts (hereafter referred to as good authors) defined as all users with a cumulative post score of at least 5 after a week of account creation. On SO, about 20% of good authors are also informed:
Therefore, it seems that at least to the extend of my limited definitions, Eric was right. I thought I had to make people aware of this.
Any questions and comments are welcome.
Footnotes
- Informed badge: Read the entire about page.
- Analytical badge: Visited every section of the FAQ (retired).
