http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1171605

It has long been understood, and I have long felt, that the Categorized Questions and Answers section is fundamentally suboptimal in how it works from the users' perspective; and I can tell you that it would be essentially impossible to improve by a sequence of minor tweaks. What we need is a fresh start. And whatever that looks like, it should reduce the complexity of the site, not add to it. I would suggest that the QA section should be eliminated entirely, and instead have some means to identify and indicate "good questions" and "best answers" among the nodes in the Seekers of Perl Wisdom section. Here are my thoughts; please share yours.

QandAEditors would have a way to attach a "good" flag to nodes in SoPW.

A root post (question) so flagged would be analogous to our current "approved questions", and a reply so flagged would be a "good/best answer".

(By procedure, but without enforcement, QandAEditors would generally only mark first-level replies as "good".)

Monks of sufficient venerability would be given special bonus votes to help raise the reputation of worthy replies.

Monks of Level 11 (Chaplain) and above would receive, each day, bonus votes equal to their level minus 10.
These bonus votes can only be spent according to the following restrictions:

  • Only on replies in SoPW, not on root posts and not in any other section;
  • Only to upvote, not to downvote; and
  • Only on nodes which the monk has already upvoted.
In effect, a Level 11 monk would get a chance, once per day, to give +=2 to a SoPW reply of hir choice.

Ancillary to all the above, there would of course be a way visually to indicate which replies to a question were deemed "best". There may even be a reply sorting option to put best answers at the top. An option could be added to Super Search to let the user get only "best answers", if desired.

If this proposal is enacted, then we could theatrically theoretically create a batch process to convert all of the existing Categorized Questions to SoPW posts with the "good" flag set, and their answers to replies similarly. That would fairly trivial.

Credit goes to the author of Re^2: Threaded Monks Yodeling Modeling, for stimulating me to think more about this problem and try to come up with a potential solution.

Why Level 11? Because any time we come up with an idea for a new "level power", I like to try to assign it to a level which currently has none. Ideally, each level would offer some new prize as an enticement. And looking at Number of Monks by Level, I see the numbers jump at level 11. For this arrangement to be worthwhile, we'd need a goodly number of monks to participate.


See followup: RFC: Better Best Answers Gets Real

I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.