What would it look like if rep for questions counted the same/more than answers?

Question

I suppose we can't change the way reputation works on just our site so eventually if this became a serious proposal change it would have to happen on the mother Meta. But before I go and get flamed there, I figured I'd start a discussion here.

It seems that on our site in particular, we don't have a hard time generating high quality answers but it's hard to find high quality questions. When a question is upvoted, the asker gets 5 rep. When an answer is upvoted, the asker gets 10 rep.

This seems to imply that answers are worth more than questions. In some sense I agree, answers take a lot of work to put together. But a good question often times takes more work to put together than a good answer, particular in physics. We have previously discussed (ad nauseum) the fact that there are people who only answer questions and don't ask, and that there are many more lower quality questions coming in.

So would changing the reputation earned (and lost) on questions to match answers encourage more questions? Or would it just inflate reputations because the majority of people wouldn't change their habits? Would we want to encourage more questions (which by default would also bring in more lower-quality questions as well)?

Answer 1

I don't ask questions or refrain from asking questions on SE based on the amount of rep I will gain. I ask a question if I want to know the answer.

High levels of activity are not necessarily a sign of health, so it's not obvious to me that a low number of good questions is a bad thing, to be remedied by fiddling with rules. One of the reasons I stopped being very active on WP and physicsforums.com is that the structure of both of those sites seemed to encourage a lot of "churn." Physicsforums probably has 20 threads on the Ehrenfest paradox, each with 300 posts. This is not a good thing.

It seems that on our site in particular, we don't have a hard time generating high quality answers

Not sure I agree with this. Easy questions get good answers. Hard questions often don't. This is just the logic of the bell curve. There are few experts in the world and many novices.

Answer 2

When Stack Overflow launched the scoring was the same for questions and answers. This eventually became a bit of a cause for concern when a number of users who had

• never offered an answer
• mostly had zero or negative net scores on their very many poor questions

but were still accumulating enough rep to access some important site privileges. There rose a movement to increase the power of down votes on questions, which was status-planned for some time after which the team suddenly decided to reduce the upvote value on questions instead.

I believe that this slightly increased the quality of questions on Stack Overflow (mostly by discouraging hoards of bad questions, rather than by generating a lot of really good ones), but it was a small thing.

So, my expectation based on that ancient history on a different site is that while this proposal might bring in a few more good questions it would also bring in many more bad ones.

That said, we have more tools for dealing with problem users now, so maybe would could handle it, but I don't know for sure.

Answer 3

My problem with this discussion is that I wonder about the correlation between votes and quality. Admittedly I can only read fairly elementary topics. But I find that questions that give me a lot to think just get downvoted, and I also find wrong answers at the top of the votes. And the vote ordering is often not the quality ordering (when I think I can estimate it with fair reliability).

The problem is that science has never been a matter of opinion, or of vote. The usefulness of vote is more sociological than scientific. Interestingly, the rep gives you a right to manage, not to decide on scientific issues, which is probably a good thing. But it is also a bit of a problem since users can confuse rep and scientific reliability.

There is also the problem that quality is not easily measured. So many users think that a formula is an explanation ... sometimes they do not even bother defining notation, assuming some universality of it. Ther is also the opposite: answers by someone who has an opinion though he does not really know anything on the topic and does not have half an argument to back his opinion.

Now, as I said, I can only read the more elementary topics, and I have been wondering whether the situation is the same for the more advanced questions. My guess is that one can talk nonsense at any level, but what is it actually?

Regarding specifically the quality of questions, what matters most is the sexyness-entertaining quality of the question, not actual content or preparatory work. I will take the example of two questions that are exactly on the same topic, but were not flagged as such: Origin of motion and relative speed of bodies in the universe and Why are there no asteroids or meteoroids with relativistic speeds?

The first question was mine, actually my fist post on physics.SE after doing no physics for more decades than I care to tell. It took me a long time to write that question as I was trying to understand first what issues could matter, what kind of data and question might be sensible.

I was very lucky to be upvoted once, and to get a nice answer.

The second question was asked 2 month later. It is exactly the same issue, presented as a disaster movie. It was not detected as duplicate and attracted much attention and 20 upvotes.

So should I try to ask questions as a scientist, or as a showman ?

The other issue, directly related, is the questions removed as duplicate. First, it is inconsistant (see above) and sometimes inaccurate. Answering old questions is a waste of time. I know as I did it more than my share. Thoses answers do not get votes or comments, and I personnally hate writing for a black hole.

So the practice of stopping duplicate question is just the best way to ensure that further input will not come, of that a different perspective will be avoided. What would have happened if the second question above had been detected as duplicate, as it should have ?

And I am really wondering what is the purpose, and the dangers, of such a site.