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I like the top users feature. It brings out my competitive spirit.

The one thing that bugs me about it is that as far as I can see, it is not affected at all by the number of accepted answers. It would be nice if this was included in some way. Even if it was just another column by the number of questions answered and up votes.

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It may help people judge someone’s ability in a tag. If there are two people with similar numbers of questions and upvotes one may have written something on a popular question, and a load of tosh on numerous others. The other may have spent time answering in detail other non popular questions and being accepted. Especially with the CV thingy it may be important to note such differences

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  • Possible duplicate - meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2238/…
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Nov 29, 2009 at 14:31
  • Not a duplicate -- this is asking for the accepted answer count on the top users page, not the profile page.
    – Jon Seigel
    Commented Dec 11, 2010 at 16:19
  • For obscure tags, where the answer is often only ever seen by the OP, this would be far better a measure than upvotes. Accepted generally means correct - upvotes are a sign of how many people it helped. IMO, the better user is the one that answers many questions well, not one good answer on a popular question. Similar talk: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/196511/…
    – Chris
    Commented Mar 16, 2014 at 17:56
  • @Chris - Accepted means it's the answer that helped the OP the most. It doesn't necessarily mean it meets the definition of "correct". Although it could be, it's not guaranteed.
    – jmort253
    Commented Mar 16, 2014 at 17:57
  • @jmort253 - It's very rare for accepted answers to be incorrect - 0.1% of time I'd say. 0-score accepted answers however? I'd guess around 20%?
    – Chris
    Commented Mar 17, 2014 at 9:47
  • All speculation and guesses aside, @Chris, it's still the answer that helped the OP, and there's still a possibility of a better, more correct answer out there. Discouraging more people from answering hurts the mission to seek the best answers. Hope this helps.
    – jmort253
    Commented Mar 17, 2014 at 15:29
  • @jmort253 - I think you've missed my point. Many correct, accepted answers out there aren't upvoted at all - not because they're wrong, but because they have a very narrow scope. I don't see how taking these as a measure of a users ability on a tag "discourages" anyone from answering. (Feel free to migrate this to chat, if you have the ability, I think we're going on a bit here!)
    – Chris
    Commented Mar 17, 2014 at 15:41

4 Answers 4

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They could use it for a third parameter sort, so votes-answers-accepted.

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I'd quite like to see this done too, both on a 30-day and all-time basis. It's all about ego-stoking! :-)

While yes, I know that there's always a possibility that someone could have a lot of accepted answers while the community disagrees that they are valuable, that actually seems to be pretty rare. (Anecdotally) it's uncommon that a question is accepted and not the most highly-scored answer, and rarer still that it isn't the next most highly scored when not “best”. The cases where it happens seem to be where someone that many people rate very highly – a “rockstar programmer” – makes a point that is generally OK, but which isn't actually an answer to the question; there appears to be a few sub-communities of SO where this sometimes happens, but thankfully it's rare. Ultimately we should all be here to answer the questions that are asked, not to grandstand.

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I fully agree on this one. For example, on node.js I have 21 accepted answers, but just 18 upvotes. Mainly because I am answering the obscure questions; which leads to a very low upvotes/questions percentage.

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Coming at this from the "specialist" badge point of view:

  • Counting an acceptance towards your in-tag vote count would give the question asker two effective votes. Now, askers are often the people least able to judge the quality of an answer, so it would not do to give them more leverage towards determining who the "experts" are.
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  • 2
    Because acceptance means "this worked for me" not "this is the right answer".
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Commented Oct 8, 2009 at 16:39
  • You are right, I don't think they should count towards the specialist badges, but it would be nice if they were on the tag stats page.
    – Jeremy French
    Commented Oct 9, 2009 at 13:21

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