On 26/05/13 17:57, Marc Tompkins wrote:
On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 7:19 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info>wrote:
You can edit *other* people's questions and answers??!??!??
What. The. Hell.
The idea is to build an authoritative information resource (in particular,
the goal is that the accepted answer to any given question will become the
primary result for someone Googling that same question.) So it makes very
good sense that both questions and answers can be edited for quality, and
the result is (mostly) good.
That's all very well and good when you're dealing with a system like Wikipedia,
where edits belong to the entire community, not the person who merely made the
edit. But Stackoverflow is specifically in the form of Question/Answer, where
both questions and answers are labelled as belonging to the person who made
them. Stackoverflow has the form of a conversation, with questions and
*replies*. How can you judge the quality of a response when you cannot be sure
that the question you are reading is the same question that was answered? Your
reputation depends on the relevance of your reply. Change the question, and
your perfectly sensible, helpful reply may look like an idiot's waffling:
Q: How do I sort a list without using any built-in functions or methods?
A: Start at this Wikipedia page, where many different sort-algorithms are
listed.
# Question gets edited.
Q: How do I count the number of 0's, 1's and 2's in a list without using any
built-in functions or methods?
A: Start at this Wikipedia page, where many different sort-algorithms are
listed.
And now I look like a first degree moron. By the way, I am not making this
scenario up. Read this thread starting here:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2013-May/647400.html
My objection is to people gaming the system - making imperceptible edits
like dashes-to-em-dashes - in order to juice their scores.
So these edits aren't default-deny, but default-accept? Worse and worse.
--
Steven
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