Just yesterday, I read this and there dmckee♦ posted this comment, and he said:
...relatively small fraction of the eligible users apply their power with any regularity.
Now there is already a question regarding this comment by Emilio Pisanty, but that just asks for data. Now, I have written this question because of the line from dmckee's comment which I have quoted.
There are many users which have a high rep but they raised almost negligible flags, have done only a few edits and reviewed only a few posts (and have asked a lot of questions and given only a few answers, but let's not get into that {This was not said for all the high rep users. But I still argue that you might find a handful of them. But since they do not form the majority so I am not addressing asking or answering}). I have quite a few examples, but I don't think it's good to publicly say their names, I understand that not everyone has the time to contribute to the community, but there should be, in my opinion, a certain amount of contribution made compulsory after a certain amount of reputation.
If you want some numbers, then I envision that after a reputation of 1000, users should at least flag 10 questions in a month, edit 5 posts in a month and do 10 reviews in a month before they ask their next question. However they are free to answer. The restriction should only apply on asking questions. In this way, we will be able to deal with the ever-growing mass of dumb questions and the moderators and hard-core contributors can then spare some time to answer questions.
The burden of holding up the community should be equally divided. We have almost 1600 users who have rep>1000. Even if only 10% of the users are active, then also this will amount to 160 contributors. This is quite a significant amount of people. Also, if the community participates and contributes, then we no longer would have those bad moderator complaints.
You can even search about this further using Stack Exchange Data Explorer, but unfortunately I am not familiar with SEDE.
I know that this change will need to be across all the communities so I should have posted it on Mother Meta. But I think that our community needs this change right now. Moreover, I am reluctant to post on the Mother Meta, but I am not aware of the situation of other communities, so I think it is better not to post there. However, I would be really happy if someone else, who agrees with me and also knows about SE better than me, does that. I have also not added the feature-request tag as this is just a discussion about whether this idea is feasible or not. If this is received well, then I think I would make another post requesting this feature.
The reason for stressing the contributions to the community is because I consider myself a good and active contributor ad thus when I see other people, more knowledgeable and capable than me but not so active contributors, I can't help but wonder how good this site would be if they also contributed as much as I did.
Also, this isn't a pressing issue. But it might become a pressing issue in the near future. So right now, we are not really lacking contributors but to prevent any lack of contributors in the future, we must act now.
TL;DR :- See the title.
