Reputation needed to achieve editor powers

The new system has substantially increased the reputation needed for editor powers. If anything I would have expected the bar to be lowered not raised. Apart from an apparent grandfather clause and special powers given to TMW employees, of the currently active editors only Walter and Jan would be able to delete, and a few editors (including myself) would not even have editor powers yet. I think dumping more editorial responsibility on Walter and Jan is a mistake.

Answer 1

[Sean de Wolski]

Fangjun (on vacation) and I can also do whatever based on rep, and IA is almost there. On that note, we're all going to see a big spike in our reputations now that all those high quality old answers can be accepted.

[Daniel Shub]

Yes, I was being biased in my statement of the world, but I did say active (eliminating Fangjun) and non TMW employees (eliminating you). My point was that I think we don't have enough editors and that making it take longer to become an editor is a mistake. I am not sure to what extent I will use my grandfathered powers. I would like to think I earned them honestly, and not just because I was an early adopter.

[Jan]

Matt Fig and Paulo Silva have left the forum also. So 3 of the 11 editors are inactive, and I'm complaining the half of the day already - it's obvious that I should take a break. I like the method used in some other forums: The editors propose other users and the admins ask them, if they want to join to the group of editors. Finally the editors can retire, if they want to. This is more personal and less suceptible for trolling or missusage. Even 1000 correct but inpolite answers will not elevate the power of a user automatically, but the admins and editors choose the ones they like. The social control is stronger than the mechanical limits triggered by points.

I assume this forum is thought to work for more than 10 years. You will see several strange persons appearing in the forum - I mean even stranger than we are!

PS. Please do not eliminate Sean.

[Walter Roberson]

My understanding is that Sean is using only "regular" editor status, as he does not work for MATLAB Central. Kaustubha as well (though I thought I once saw her edit a question shortly before she reached 1500.)

Oleg is not around very much now (though he was on today.)

[Sean de Wolski]

@Walter, this understanding is correct, and my employment here came about 400reputation after hitting the initial editor status. Of course it is also because of this status that I was ever on their radar.

Hint Hint to all you grad students out there worried about the real world and would like a side door into an awesome company!

[Honglei Chen]

@Sean, I really enjoy your comment. Nice hint!

[Image Analyst]

Perhaps Sean, if you can find them. But it won't be easy, for example.....It says I have 2109 answers but when I click on My Answers, it (annoyingly) shows the oldest ones first. I had to click way to the end, like page 42 or something, to see my latest responses. But it quit at 2000. No posts past that despite saying I should have 2109. I could continue to go to the last page for posts but none show up beyond 2000, and the caption is also screwed up. It shows 1951 - 2000 of 2,109 (OK, normal, with posts showing), but then 2001 - 2000 of 2,109 (what the heck's up with those numbers - 2001 to 2000????, plus no posts show up), then 2051 - 2050 of 2,109 and finally,2101 - 2100 of 2,109. It won't even let me page past 2100 to see posts 2101 - 2109. Maybe no posts show up because the low number is incorrectly greater than the high number????? Messed up!!!

Do others with more than 2000 posts have this problem?

[Sean de Wolski]

IA, I have the same issue at less than 2000. It says I have 1857 answers so "ceil(1857/50) ans = 38": http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/3208495-sean-de-wolski/answers?page=38

It's empty. Going back to page 37, there are only a few answers. I would guess these are answers to deleted questions that are unaccounted for.

[Image Analyst]

Any idea how to get the latest ones to show up at the _top _of the list, on the _first _page like it used to? And anyway to get it to italicize correctly again and not put an underline after the space after the word you double clicked on, or put underlines on both sides and not italicize at all?

[Honglei Chen]

I have long observed that the number of answer shown in the contributor page is not the same as the number of answer shown in the Answers page. In my case, the contributor page says I've answered 371 questions but in My Answers it says I have 353 answers. I believe this has to do those deleted questions.

[Walter Roberson]

The sort order is indicated by Randy to be a bug that will be fixed.

[Sean de Wolski]

And is now!

[Image Analyst]

Then why do I already see Delete links on the questions, answers, and comments when my reputation is not quite 3000 yet?

[Walter Roberson]

Starting today we’re expanding the number of privileges you may earn and distributing them based on finer-grained levels of reputation (the existing editors are grandfathered in and retain all privileges).

Note the part in brackets. You already had delete privs so you get to keep them.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

Recently I have been considering the opposite: that there might come a time when the reputation bars might need to be made higher.

I have been monitoring reputations the last few weeks, and noting people accumulating multiples of the earlier 1500 level, and considering that over time just through sheer accumulation more and more people are going to reach the 1500 level, and that there could come a point where that becomes a "too many cooks" problem. We aren't there yet, though.

Meanwhile, I look and see that I am skewing the grade curve rather a lot. I suspect that if I were on the MATLAB Central team, I would be looking and saying, "We now have someone at 9 times the editor level: have we set the level too low?"

[Ryan]

I like the idea of being able to earn privelages, but Walter is right. Over time the values will need to change or there will be a large amount of editors. Perhaps grant the right to being an editor based off of percentages? Let the top 10% of users ranked by reputation earn editor rights (or some %, I'm not sure how many registered and non-active users there are).

[Daniel Shub]

I agree about the too many cooks problem. I also think we are not there yet. The vacation rate is such that I am not sure we get there in the near future.

[Sean de Wolski]

And this is why it editor should be a function of reputation + dreputation/dt!

[Walter Roberson]

If you click on the Contributors page and look at the clicker arrows, there are just a handful short of 79000 users registered. It could be that that includes everyone registered for any part of MATLAB Central not just the people who use Answers. I would imagine that a number of people read Answers without registering (since you don't need to register to read it.)

The number was, by the way, approximately 55000 at the beginning of 2012. (Hee... I just realized that I've accidentally been preserving a historical record of the numbers and could make a table if it was worth doing.)

[Ryan]

Make a Trendy?

[Geoff]

Well, I foresee that some people who have accumulated enough reputation will be close to losing interest in the forum anyway. The bar should be set at the point where natural attrition balances out achievement. I think it would be a mistake to introduce factors such as reputation per month or whatever... That could introduce competition amongst contributors, which would be against the spirit of this forum.

Answer 3

[Walter Roberson]

I do foresee problems along the lines Daniel mentioned.

The existence of the "flag" box implies that people will do a bunch of flagging. Someone has to investigate and make decisions on everything that is flagged. My assessment is that MATLAB Central does not have the resources to do that on a large scale. I partly base my assessment on the fact that we have tagged a number of posts with "duplicate posts requiring merging" but I have observed very little merging being done by staff.

The "not appropriate" and "spam" possibilities require Delete powers to deal with the situation. The new rep structure would set the Delete level at 3000. Only 3 of the still-active volunteers have reached that level (including Sean.) Another 2 of the still-active community volunteers are "reasonably close" and would reach there pretty soon. 2 of TMW volunteer staff are a bit down from that and would reach that level in about another 3-ish months.

Doing some mental estimates based upon my knowledge of whom is active and how long it has taken them to earn the rep they have learned, I would guess that, of the people who are not already Editors, the person who would probably be next to reach 3000, would be Thomas, currently 916, if he doesn't burn out, and I would estimate it would be another year-ish (perhaps a bit less) for him to get to that level.

Thus, this load of clean-up work is, for quite a number of months yet, going to be upon those who are already editors and are still active. And that leads me to think that if the flagging is going to be a success at increasing SNR that we do not have the human resources to handle the situation and the levels have not been set at a point suitable for gaining more human resources in time.

The "unclear" option of flagging questions is a bit easier to deal with - at least in theory - as appropriate reaction from those with enough privs would include Closing the question, which is a 1500 rep instead of a 3000 rep level.

There are plenty of questions that are sufficiently confusing that one would barely know where to start to answer them. And there plenty of others so vague that they would need several textbooks to answer. "Close" may well be appropriate for such questions.

Myself, I find that many many questions are unclear, and that part of the art of Answering is reading enough "between the lines" to be able to steer the Poster towards productive aspects. A plain "this is not clear" message is not going to do the trick for most posters, as often they do not know what is unclear or do not know how to explain themselves better without being prompted. Questions that fall into this category of Unclear are, I feel, not best dealt with by Closing them: they benefit from dialoging.

When I think of such Questions being flagged as Unclear, then since the flag needs to be dealt with by someone, I feel apprehensive that I will feel pressured to undertake those dialogs personally even when I do not know anything about the topic, or don't Feel The Enthusiasm about the topic. Or when it is by one of the Posters who over-uses the resource and don't do their own research and have a history of difficulty in understanding explanations. I can't handle everything! I expect that it wouldn't take long before I wanted to UNFLAG something on the grounds of "I don't feel like dealing with this; let's toss it back in the pot and let it stew and maybe someone else will feel like answering."

There is a difference between "So vague and so little effort put into it that no-one should be expected to deal with it", versus "There's real meat here but someone needs to work with the Poster to get the question to a (potentially) solvable form." Both of these would be handled by "Unclear" though...

Did I mention that I'm due for a long vacation soon? A Turn Off The Computer And Get Out of Town vacation? (Hmmm, sounds good at this point!)

[Image Analyst]

I think you're putting too much pressure on yourself. Answer what you want. Don't answer what you don't want. Don't feel obligated to explain things to people. Certainly don't do it so much that it stresses you out. Don't feel bad for ignoring posts (I don't), even if you knew you could educate that person if you just had an extra 15 minutes to write up a detailed response. I turn down direct requests to me for code or explanations of articles all the time. You can't do it all, and we can't do it all (we just don't have the time even if we had the desire) and some questions will fall by the wayside. Oh well. They'll probably eventually solve their problem without you (but then won't come back here to say so).

[Image Analyst]

I just flagged a question to see what it would look like: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/42294-sort-my-answers-from-newest-oldest The flag does not show up in the general listing, only when you open the question. So how are we supposed to know which questions have been flagged? Do we have to search for them? It might be nice to have a little flag icon for it in the general listing so it's right in my face and I'd see it easier.

[Jan]

@IA: You can find the list of "Flagged Content" in the menu on the top left.