Is it really desireable to reduce the site's content to an information base? After all, if it's to be a community, a certain amount of non-informational content would seem not only to be tolerable, but necessary.

I think "thank you" posts are a good example. Having a real community requires a degree of civility, and on the Internet that's a scarce commodity. So why not /msg your thanks? Because then everyone doesn't see it. Gratuitous posts of gratitude establish a tone, and establish for everyone an obvious standard of courtesy. Saying thank you, from a practical standpoint, is a waste of time in real life, just as it's a waste of space and bandwidth here. But it makes a difference; I'm guessing that difference could be increasingly important as many new monks arrive.

jcwren: "Ideally, you'd like the reputation of any of your articles to be above the $NORM value"

Now there's something I don't think is of much value... an impossible ideal. I realize you surely aren't suggesting that everyone should be above average, but is dragging down $NORM even something with which posters should be concerned? It seems to me that the voting/experience system is supposed to be modeled after the nature of conversation on such a forum, helping to improve the quality. Modeling our conversation after the voting/experience system does not seem like a good idea to me.

I would suggest a different ideal. If your post has a positive reputation, that's good. It means that at least someone thought well of it, and that more people thought well of it than poorly. If it's higher, that's better. You're making people happy.

Because of the technical nature of the site, you're not likely to feel compelled to say something unpopular because you feel it's true. Nevertheless, this is a good example of why an ideal which, at its root, is strictly majoritarian may not be a good idea. The voting system can help improve content, but can't replace conscience and good intent.

jcwren:"This meant that there were (and still are) some people with very high XP, but virtually no articles. Thus, dividing thier XP by the number of articles written is not representative of how much that user contributed (or, more aptly, didn't contribute) to the site."

If by voting you make no contribution to the site, then it seems clear that you should get no XP for voting. Perhaps this is what you mean. But if you assume that it is useful and good that posts should be popularly rated, then people who simply vote are contributing to the site (assuming they do so responsibly). Perhaps the relative weights of voting vs. posting don't reflect the real contributions made, but that's a different story.

Further, people who achieve higher levels are invited to participate in the maintenance of the site, editing faqlets, moderating content, and perhaps performing other chores I don't yet know of. In this way also people can contribute without posting... the average reputation of your posts just seems like too narrow a metric to me.

Improving the signal-to-noise ratio for those browsing a topic is very important; this is a technical site, after all. But the voting system does not seem designed to do this, but rather to act as a more general index of a post's contribution to the community.

I'm afraid I'm becoming long-winded, so I'll stop. I should say that I don't mean to imply that your views are opposite to everything I've said here, only to offer a different perspective. Having a single standard of virtue (epitomized by the very impressive Erudil) seems somehow un-Perlish.

According to the Voting/Experience System node, I get a 25% chance of getting 2xp for being logged each day. I get a 25% chance of getting 1xp for every vote I cast. These methods of getting XP are not related to my writeups or my rep.

When I see that I have more XP in the XP nodelet, it doesn't tell me this is because someone voted up a writeup I've made, or if it's because I was logged on 24 hours ago. True, I can guess that if I get a +1 after voting, it was because of the vote, but if I leave a good post at 10PM, and log back on at 8AM, and see that I have 5 more XP, was that 5 from the rep alone, or 3 from the rep and 2 from the "logged on within 24 hours" scheme?

I can't tell from looking at the XP nodelet, or from my homepage, which XP is from signal, and which XP is from noise, so I can't calculate my S/N ratio.

I said upfront that it wasn't my model *g*. Nevertheless, the following axioms make it, if not a neccessarily exact measure of S/N, at least well-ordered:

• You can't lose XP for having one of your articles moderated upward, and you can't gain from having one moderated downward.
• You can't gain (or lose) more than one XP for each point of moderation applied.

Thus, we can at the very least use the sum total of all the moderations of all of a user's articles as an upper bound for the amplitude of "signal", and still compute an S/N ratio based on the value of that bound -- think of it as a "Peak S/N Ratio" within the space of all the possible values "signal" could take on for a given user.

Spud Zeppelin * spud@spudzeppelin.com

You are gonna have to give me an example of how this works...

I have 325 XP, the sum of my reps is 458, over 77 posts. The node with the highest rep has 22 rep (and there only one that high), and the lowest is -1 (also a singleton). Although the mean rep is 5.95 (less than $NORM=6.17), the mode is much smaller, at 3 (13 writeups), which is much less than $NORM.

How would you compute my SNR?