Robert Schweikert (rjschwei@suse.com) wrote:
Who is going to play God and decide what the value of a contribution is?
This is not the community that we are! We do not need a group of select/elite people to decree what the value of contributions are!
Clearly an effective karma system doesn't work like this, so I hope noone's proposing it. The community awards karma to the community - simple. Any artificial tiering obviously risks creating undesirable politics and resentment.
Additionally values cannot be measured in this sense in the first place.
In what sense?
For example when a wiki page is translated to a language I do not speak the value of that contribution to me is zero. But for someone who does not speak/read the language in which the wiki page was originally composed and the wiki page "suddenly" shows up in their native language the value of the translation contribution is extremely high.
Right - value in this sense is entirely relative to context. But that doesn't mean that it can't be quantified to some extent, it just means it can't be reliably compared across contexts. And it sounds to me like a lot of people are panicking or objecting to this karma idea because a) they're getting hung up on the assumption that there has to be a single karma metric which applies across all contexts, and/or b) the difference between earning of "manual" and "automatic" karma is being blurred. A single karma metric creates some obvious difficulties which have already been raised - you can't compare the value of coding with Factory reviews or docs or graphics, period. Automatic karma (e.g. "you get X points for every accepted SR you submit") is also clearly unreliable. Manual karma is "by the people for the people", so in general should be a fairly robust and self-healing trust metric.
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There is nothing in here that says we put values on contributions by rating them.
Well, there's nothing in there about a lot of the implementation details ;-) So I don't think that's a valid argument not to do it. Having said that, I'm currently torn both ways - I think I see where you're coming from, but I also see other communities which are incredibly successful thanks to a well-implemented karma system (and yes, communities whose karma system kind of sucks - slashdot to name just one).
That should be fair, clear and transparent.
As soon as you assign a value it will no longer be fair or clear.
Why? You may be right, but there seems to be a big jump in the logic of that statement. (Apologies if I missed something; I came to this thread late.) I would be really interested to hear people's thoughts on why stackoverflow is such a huge success, and why that kind of success may or may not be possible to replicate in our community. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org