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Re^4: Zen and the art of ignoring XPby Tanktalus (Canon) |
on May 12, 2005 at 14:21 UTC ( [id://456399]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
And that's the same way I saw it when I first visit this site... Funny - maybe it's because I used to participate on /. that I realised before even joining PM that XP was merely a measure of participation, not a measure of knowledge. This is obvious. When I joined, it was patently obvious to me that there were some Saints who didn't know nearly as much as I did. And now, it's patently obvious that there are some with lesser XP than I who know way more than I do about Perl - tlm and TimToady are two obvious examples off the top of my head. TimToady doesn't participate much, so that's why his XP is so low. Meanwhile, tlm hasn't been here as long as I, but, rest assured, he'll pass my XP level in the not-too-distant future - a week or two at most, barring some grave problem, such as a vacation. So I turned XP into a game. Not one with winners and losers, just one to see how much, how fast. And, before I even reached Saint, it was obvious that tlm would shatter any record I may have on reaching that level ;-) Ah well. I think I did well to get to Saint in under 3 months ;-) But, before someone claims "XPW" - does it matter? The point is that, according to the way other members spend their hard-earned votes, I made a significant positive contribution to PM. And that's really all that XP is measuring. Update: The ever-so-humble tlm (hey, isn't Hubris the perlish virtue, not humility?) doesn't like the comparison with TimToady. :-) So, let's put it in a bit of context. I read somewhere that all it takes for someone to seem a genius is 3%. If someone knows merely 3% more of a subject than you, they seem to be a genius in the subject, even if they really don't know very much. Think of a grade 5 student teaching a grade 3 student math - the grade 3 student would think the grade 5 student "knows everything" about math, when we all know that most PhD's in Mathematics know very little about math. (At least, that's what my manager claims - who actually has a PhD in Math.) And that's kind of how I'm using tlm and TimToady in the same sentence. If we assume, on a scale of 1 to 10, that TimToady's knowledge warrants a 10, and I get a 3, tlm seems to be getting a 5 or 6. (And that's on a logarithmic scale ;->) From my perspective, that's more than 3% - can't tell the difference from here ;-> Update 2: Oh, here's another one who would be the "less XP than me, but oh-so-obvious that he knows more about perl than I could ever know": TheDamian.
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