http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=163017

Hello,
people; I was wondering about experience. Not my own experience in my life, but PerlMonks Experience. I see that I'm pushed by my subconscious to keep in good consideration fellow monks that have a high level, and therefore a high experience. But I soon realize that many many low-level monks vote as many nodes as possible without thinking just because there is a chance to get more xp points (and here I say "more xp points", which doesn't mean at all "more experience"). This inevitably leads to a distortion of the whole system; I fear that many points in the Holy Monastery are randomly assigned by some monks.
The other terrible consideration is that, if I post a banal node (say a really simple and obvious obfu, for instance) I get the possibility to be upvoted just because of the already exposed habit. So, if I was stupid believing to be smart, I'd post an incredible number of simple but not silly nodes, shoveling xp points out of 'em and without really meriting them.
This is evil. And worst of all leads to decay, 'cos many acolytes will grow with a wrong concept of experience.
I'd like to point out that this is not a challenge, or at least not versus other monks. That's a challenge versus ourselves, and we cannot win if we get far from the right path.
All this to propose a thing: as I found that there are some basic forms of exploitation of the experience system, I thought it would have been possible to modify it in the following way:

experience is assigned by the following rule: XP=(points/number of posted nodes)

so that if I get many points from many obvious posts, their weight is reduced. By the way, doing this way, people would be pushed towards posting really good works, getting many upvotes for them, as the method of posting "bait nodes" to get upvotes wouldn't work anymore.
You could fear that this can be discouraging for low-level monks, and so I thought that some correction factor could be introduced to calibrate the previous rule depending on the actual level of the monk (i.e. if you are a low-level monk, your calculation will be corrected by a >1 positive factor which will be lowered proportionally as you raise your level).
After all, I'm pleased with myself to have succeeded in reaching "monk (5)" status with only few more than twenty nodes, and this may be not a rarity, but it surely is not the rule.
I'm working towards the "friar" status, but I wanna be sure to get there for my merits and not by chance, and so I would it to be for all my brethren. We're learning Perl in a wonderful way, experiencing the spirit of a real community without neither have ever met each other, and I don't want to see all this transformed in the brand new net-related battlefield.
Sincerely yours,

SiG

perl -le 's ssSss.s sSsSiss.s s$sSss.ss .$s\107ss.print'