Friday, October 7, 2011

Where to get programming help and Reputation Systems

Perhaps the best place to get programming tips/help is
http://stackoverflow.com/.

What makes the site so effective, is its "moderation" or editting system.  This type of system, generically called a Reputaion system, is based on the user rating of the quality of the question or answer.  Higher ratings cause the content to bubble up.

I first became a fan of such a system on perlmonks.org, a site for perl questions.  The format really broke out when it was implemented with a beautiful UI on Digg.com for any type user submited content.

These systems quality can vary depending on the behavior of the community.  XKCD riffed on this.  I am fascinated that these system generally produce very high quality results, even when it is known that you can game these systems.  A good read on this topic is "The Wisdom of Crowds".

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