Pure reputation does not tell much. But if you instead look at tag badges, then you’ve got something. If you have a tag badge, then you have at least some proof that you have some relevant skill.
Actually, in some way I would say that if a question has both upvotes and downvotes, it’s means that some people are voting wrong. Granted, people can do mistakes, but if a post has 5 downvotes, that’s a very good indication that it should not have any upvotes. At least if people are trying to vote “right”.
That may be true for some technical questions, but not for all and definitely not for most non-technical questions. Every question invites some kind of “opinion-basedness”, even the most simple one, such as the following question:
How do I square every number in a list in Python?
I can imagine three different, equally correct answers to this question (for loop, map, list comprehension). I assume, that they are all “good” and explanative. All solutions have advantages and disadvantages. For example “experts” might favour the list comprehension, because it’s the most “pythonic”, whereas the for loop would be the most simple and clear solution.
Hence “wrong” upvotes and downvotes are quite seldom IMO, differing opinions and use cases are much more often. I think they are a bad assumption for a Q&A website, therefore.
2 Likes
While I agree that some questions may be a bit opinionated than others, Actually, I would not say that this example is. Irregardless of which of the methods you choose from these, provided that the answers are well written and correct I’d say that all of them deserves an upvote. Or at least not a downvote. However, a very non idiomatic solution without an explanation to why it’s used would deserve a downvote, even if it is correct. Like this:
def square(x):
if len(x) == 1:
return [x[0]**2]
else:
return [x[0]**2] + square(x[1:])
That would be a very bad solution in almost all cases. It’s slow, non idiomatic, overly complex and would run into maximum recursion depths for reasonably small lists. I cannot think of any case where it would be an acceptable answer unless the question specifically says that the solution needs to be recursive.
I guess my opinion about this is that it should be quite clear guidelines on how to vote. Sure there will be cases where it’s not clear, but not that many. Well, provided that we will allow questions that would be closed as too opinionated on SO.
After thinking about this for some time, I would like to see user’s reputation breakdown by site and each tag they’ve participated in, so I could have a better idea about this “obviously very high rep user, but do they really know much about C# or are they mostly an expert in PHP or something else”.
Just the gold tag badges like on SE is a very vague source of that information, and isn’t really as useful as it could be.