Would it be possible to add a "difficulty-level" dimension to questions? [duplicate]

Question

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How about a difficulty rating for questions?

Right now, we have a "title", which provides a summary of the problem or the key question being asked, a "question" which provides the bulk of the content, and "tags" which (in my opinion) should be used to provide a way to index the content based on what is being asked. However, there's no way to express the difficulty level or experience of the asker.

Some people advocate the use of tags for this, but I disagree simply because the tags should describe what the question is asking (relevant technologies, tools, programs, topic areas) and not describe the depth of knowledge the user has in a given field or area.

The benefits of this are two-fold:

1. Answers can be written at the appropriate level. An advanced user who knows something about the problem at hand can be given a more direct answer, while people who identify themselves as beginners would probably need to be walked through the process of solving the problem more.
2. Questions can be sorted based on difficulty. This benefits both asker and answerers. If I'm an expert on the topic of a given Stack Exchange, then I would want to view all questions, since I can handle the more advanced topics. However, if I'm just a beginner, I might not want to wade through topics that are potentially beyond my abilities at this time. And if I'm an intermediate, I know that I probably can't answer the advanced questions but can learn from them, and I can probably answer a lot of the basic questions.

By depth of knowledge of the user, I mean in the area where the question is being asked, not overall. Let's take Jon Skeet as an ever-present example. He would probably be an "expert" in C# and .NET. However, he might consider himself a "beginner" in Haskell - if he was searching through the Haskell questions, he would want to filter out the intermediate and advanced questions for now.

There are a few possible implementations, but the best would probably be just displaying the depth of knowledge on the question lists and in the question page and then adding methods for searching based on difficulty when using the search box.

Answer 1

A difficulty rating is so subjective and so fleeting, it borders on the metaphysical.

Take my question, for example: byte + byte = int… why?. The question is so simple, it would likely be covered in the first week of Intro to Computer Science 101.

Yet, the answer is so involved that even the most prolific and most qualified people on the system — I mean these people quite literally wrote the book on the subject — cannot agree on the answer.

So is it "difficulty level: 1" or "difficulty level: 10"?

Bit twiddling, pointer manipulation, and real-time programming (which was considered child's play back in my C-coding days) would probably confound most programmers today. So how would your rate those?

Answer 2

Let's ignore all the arguments on whether or not difficulty has any objective meaning for as wide an audience of programmers as is found on SO.

Let's ignore the discussion of edge cases involving simple questions that experts struggle to answer, or difficult questions solved by students.

Let's boil this suggestion down to its essence...

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Should we add one more piece of meta-data for askers to fill in before posting a question?

No.

There are a huge number of questions posted where the question itself isn't even in the title, and where the tags consist of whatever language the user works in... or just a word, picked seemingly at random, from the confused body of the post.

It's a pretty safe bet at this point that whatever new required meta field you add, most of the data entered into it will be wrong until some kind editor takes pity on it and tries to correct it. At which point it'll only be slightly wrong.

And then there's the matter of the 800K+ questions already asked, all of which will lack valid data in this field.

So, you'll have a new dimension to the data, but most of it will be empty, and most of what is there will be invalid. Garbage in, garbage out... Who would use such a thing?

Answer 3

• Idea - Great Idea. In the perfect world it would make things alot easier.
• Implementation - Horrible. Why? Because everything is subjective. Nobody could agree on weather 25% of the questions are hard, easy, or in the middle. Going down the latter is easy, since you can judge when during your learning time you should of known this. But going up the latter, how would you know? Is string manipulation easy, medium, or hard? Is regex easy or medium? Comments would turn into flame wars of essentially "I learned that during the first week!" "Your crazy, I never did it till 2 years ago" "Well thats because you are slow" "I'm not slow" and so on.

Answer 4

This is mostly my opinion here of course, but I'm not seeing this as very useful, let's go back to that C# example, what does the question difficulty have to do with the experience of the asker? I would think it has more to do with the answerer audience.

For example I don't do encryption daily, and a question around it I'd be more of a beginner than an expert, but a person who deals with it daily...that's an easy question. It's completely relative to who's answering, and unless you put in a "beginner to expert" rating somewhere for each question type (by tag I guess?) the system wouldn't know what to do. I look at probably 200-500 different tags on the questions I view daily...so this would be no small task of just assigning those values. Also, tags are too generic for this, at least in the larger categories.

I think the brick wall on this one is who or what determines that difficulty level, automating it means a lot of data entry for each user, and someone assigning it basically means a wrong vale, since it's completely relative to the person viewing the question.