Issues about the law and legal matters are somewhat unlike other topics of StackExchange sites.
An attorney has to pass the bar. A programmer, gamer, contractor, designer, writer, etc aren't required to have direct certification or authorization to work in their chosen profession (other than a ...
Which I'm sure everyone here has seen and given their two cents on if they want to :)
But thought I'd chuck it in here just to be sure.
Also @feetwet I kind of know what you mean. It'd be good for people to pay attention to those with professional qualifications but at the same time, and as I mentioned, I wouldn't want that to be the only reason for people to do so.
Like... I would assume that a lawyer's answer is probably going to be better than a layperson's but I'd look at the answer.
I wouldn't really want this to shortcut the community's vetting of this answers by being critical of them, either.
I think enough of that already happens a la: Oh, this user has heaps of reputation, they must be right!
True Story — For thousands of years, the world's professional societies and religions have disseminated its teachings in arcane languages understood by few. It was believed that such knowledge in the hands of the the unwashed masses would be dangerous without the proper tutelage to wield it wisel...
> We can't have a "sounds good" motif here. If you "heard" something, tell us where you heard it. There IS potential for poor advice to be passed on here, and folks simply up-voting the best-sounding answer is going to get this site shut down fast. We can't have the blind leading the blind in a subject like this.
Kinda glad that Health came before us, it gives us a lot of guidance on how to deal with questions like this.
@PatW. Hard to tell. Looks like they just decided to not put anything at all. Of course, I'd need to have some medical knowledge to gauge whether voting has accurately identified good answers.
@jimsug Here's a totally non-democratic idea that probably wouldn't fly on SE: use @feetwet 's concept of certified users, not to signal their answers, but as a pool of voters whose votes count at more than the single rate. People are always going to upvote 1) high rep users, 2) highly voted answers, and 3) things that sound right. In my view #3 is the largest problem on a site like this. Tiered voting might put momentum behind #2, which wouldn't be bad
There's almost a reverse precedent: you can effectively downvote something twice by flagging it and also downvoting. I'd noticed it after flagging and downvoting the "fake rape" post. After it got cleaned up, I went to remove the downvote, and it increased the score by 2. Didn't know that was a feature
I'd concur that being able to downvote twice is more important than upvoting twice as well. It works great on sites like Stackoverflow where everyone is a developer
Every day we get more than 10 question is a good day :)
If we get questions, we get answers, and more answers and questions means we get more users, and the more of all of this we have, the more visits we get.
@PatW. We definitely need more quantity of quality ;)
I really wish we could attract more law students, professors, paralegals, law librarians, and lawyers!
@PatW. BTW, who says' that's non-democratic? On SE it's already the case that "some users are more equal than others" (due to the reality of the rep/vote effects you note).
@feetwet My views are evolving on this topic. On Stackoverflow, where most people are developers or researchers, we don't really have a need for "extra vote power." Everyone can write code to some level and is mostly capable of recognizing particularly crafty ways of implementing routines. So there's no real need for superpowers.
Now that SE has extended itself to realms where laypeople and specialists are likely to interact, I'm not 100% convinced the stock Stackoverflow model is the one that will move the best answers to the top of the pile
2
Were one to implement superpowers (gradient voting), it'd be a question of how heavy handed we want our moderation (or whoever has the privilege) to be. One could probably make a reasonable argument that sites where most voters aren't specialists (and are still in beta) would be interesting candidates for something like this.
Pat, that is exactly why I offered a bounty on that question. I was disappointed with the quality of the other answers and knew that thode authors prefer to not use references
Health and skeptics both have a relatively strictly enforced referencing requirement. If you make a claim in an answer that is material to the conclusion, youve got to provide a reference for it
I'm not saying that model is right for us, but my favourite answers here are well referenced
References take time, I guess. But it's really hard to answer without references unless a) the question is general enough that it's sort of a common practice thing, or b) you've really got your finger on the pulse of that subfield...
Issues about the law and legal matters are somewhat unlike other topics of StackExchange sites.
An attorney has to pass the bar. A programmer, gamer, contractor, designer, writer, etc aren't required to have direct certification or authorization to work in their chosen profession (other than a ...
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