This is a rather impertinent suggestion, coming from a fairly recent arrival, but perhaps naivety can be made a virtue.
i've scanned the archives as best i can and there are lots of suggestions about how experience can be weighted and where it should come from, but less about what it is.
In my view, experience as currently defined conflates two attributes of the user that it would be useful to keep separate: their expertise and their diligence. It isn't a clear-cut distinction, because the criteria for ++ing are left (deliberately?) vague, but it basically comes down the points you get for participation and the ones you get for quality.
I'd like to suggest that ++ and -- would be better used as a simple index of quality of answer, and the points gained by using votes (or just turning up) should add to a separate weighting of people's strength of participation. There is probably - i speculate - a similar division possible in the administrative work, where some tasks require perl expertise and others rely more on a grasp of the geography and etiquette of this (in my experience, unique) community. The two are often, but not necessarily, related.
For those of us in the foothills, i think it would be useful to be able to see a cleaner index of perl mastery. Average points per node is an obvious one, partly suggested already, but it doesn't work under the present system. apart from anything else, mine is 9.5 and merlyn's is 7.1: not very representative. (Actually, we can't see from here anyway because one would have to separate question from answer nodes for the mean to mean anything. I suspect that the scores on answer nodes would turn out to be a better guide.)
And while I agree completely with those who argue that the real understanding of someone's worth comes from a long-term acquaintance with their input, a lot of the time i'm not qualified to assess it myself, and end up relying on other people's responses, which are also beyond me, and so on.
The diligence score, on the other hand, might not even need to be visible. it's not such an important kudos index - though i guess there are sections of the site, eg this one, where it would be a useful thing to know - but i think it might turn out to be a useful criterion for giving people permission to act on the site in different ways, from basic voting rights up to the full editorial mop and bucket. Not the only criterion, but a helpful one.
And while i don't imagine for a moment that this will be implemented, it occurs to me that it wouldn't be very hard. For the sake of fairness any new type of scoring would have to inherit its starting values from the current xp system, and the rest is pretty simple. It would even put to rest some of the grumbling about the shape of the curve and relative weighting of different sources of xp.
I mention this now only because it's possible that it wouldn't occur to people more accustomed than i am to the way things are done. Sorry if it's tired old ground.
will
In reply to mixing orthogonal types of xp? by thpfft
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