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[Meta] A slight change to karma-enabled abilities...
I have a couple of suggestions that I think it would be great if the admins took to heart. :) It shouldn't take too long to implement, either, if people agree it's a good idea.
The purpose of this site is to provide searchable, well-defined pairs of well-defined, well-written questions and their equally well-defined, well-written answers. The idea is to make the site a resource that doesn't just help the individual that asks, but anyone who happens to stumble over the question later on. We all agree on this being the purpose.
But askers often don't mark answers to their questions as correct, even when a correct answer exists. To be honest, I think it's is because they're driven by their own success rather than any kind of willingness to accept the factual correctness of anything, that is, marking an answer as correct is done only when it solved a problem and helped the asker accomplish something in his or her project. If the answer is "It can't be done", or "That's kind of hard, but here's how you can accomplish it", then it often won't get marked correct, because it wasn't an easy-to-use shortcut to success. This is a problem.
I think some users, maybe those with 5k+ karma, should be able to mark answers as correct. That way, more answers that are technically correct answers might get that green checkmark they deserve.
Also, according to the FAQ, users with karma < 15 can't upvote. Why exactly is this? This site gets questions from tons and tons of freshly created users, many of which either never return after the first question, never answer anything themselves, or ask questions so poorly worded that they're never upvoted even once. So they often never get > 15 karma. But this doesn't serve to say they're unwilling to reward an answer or unqualified to determine if an answer was good. So why can't they upvote?
Totally agree. The "marking answers correct" thing is a great idea, i can't see how it can damage the site and as you say, it tackles one problem and further builds on the usefulness of this site.
The only thing i can think of with the fresh account up voting is that there's nothing stopping people creating lots of fresh accounts and up voting themselves.
(1) - The current system was extensively discussed for stackoverflow.com and the basic idea is that correct answers float up by votes & orthogonally to that the OP can choose which one helped him the most.
(2) - What timsk said.
Problem with the whole '10 upvotes' thing for new users, is that you'd still be able to exploit it by creating two users, then each one upvotes the other (you only need one), and then both have as many upvotes as they like!
I see your point. I'm just a strong believer in understanding why something works, as opposed to knowing that it works. When i answer questions i do try to mix the 2. Answering the question with usable code that is explained briefly as part of the answer.
Good to see the communities suggestions are taken seriously here, power to the people baby! :).
Yeah, Graham really deserves some praise for listening to the community here. In fact, when I ask "Can 5k+ users please click to accept answers", and someone says, "It is now being done", I guess that qualifies as the correct answer right there. ;) Goes to click
Answer by Graham-Dunnett · Oct 21, 2011 at 12:53 PM
I have pushed a change that should allow >5k karma users to accept answers. I think we should only use this to get accepted answers when the original questioner has had some time, a week, say, to accept what they think is correct.
Awesome. Thanks a lot! And yes - I agree it's a button that shouldn't be clicked until after a little while.
Answer by Graham-Dunnett · Oct 21, 2011 at 12:54 PM
Getting 15 karma points to allow upvoting was meant to be a very simple first achievement, and means getting a question or answer upvoted. I intended this to encourage good first or second questions.
Which works, except that one of the quirks of that system is that it basically punishes people for making good answers to bad questions. Of course, other users who have the ability to upvote can always vote up answers to other people's questions, so it's not that bad.
If I see a question in the mod queue that I think is a reasonable one (meaning it's not got a trivial answer from using google) then I upvote the question so the user has karma points and belongs to the community. (Although I must say i have got pretty rubbish at doing this least last few weeks.)
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