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This is a very interesting idea, but you would need to exclude a significant subset of the user base when calculating U.
Based on my own observations of various Q&A sites including StackExchange, askbot.org and my hosted site, the median karma/reputation amount (i.e. minimum amount of karma to be in the top 50%) tends to be 1.
For example, on askbot.org, as much as 60% of the user base have only 1 karma — it would take a lot of participation by people who posted once and never returned to raise the median karma above 1.
On really successful sites such as StackOverflow, the ratio is even less favorable; over 92% of StackOverflow users have 1 reputation (see this post for an explanation of how to interpret the chart).
To work around this problem, you could simply change the calculation to be the median karma of users who have more than 1 karma.
For askbot.org, if you were to exclude all 1-karma users from the median calculation, you'd end up probably with a U value between 50 and 60 (as of the time this was posted, although it would be interesting to see if this changes over time).
This is a very interesting idea, but you would need to exclude a significant subset of the user base when calculating U.
Based on my own observations of various Q&A sites including StackExchange, askbot.org and my hosted site, the median karma/reputation amount (i.e. minimum amount of karma to be in the top 50%) tends to be 1.
For example, on askbot.org, as much as 60% of the user base have only 1 karma — it would take a lot of participation by people who posted once and never returned to raise the median karma above 1.
On really successful sites such as StackOverflow, the ratio is even less favorable; over 92% of StackOverflow users have 1 reputation (see this post for an explanation of how to interpret the chart)..
To work around this problem, you could simply change the calculation to be the median karma of users who have more than 1 karma.
For askbot.org, if you were to exclude all 1-karma users from the median calculation, you'd end up probably with a U value between 50 and 60 (as of the time this was posted, although it would be interesting to see if this changes over time).
This is a very interesting idea, but you would need to exclude a significant subset of the user base when calculating U.
Based on my own observations of various Q&A sites including StackExchange, askbot.org and my hosted site, the median karma/reputation amount (i.e. minimum amount of karma to be in the top 50%) tends to be 1.
For example, on askbot.org, as much as 60% of the user base have only 1 karma — it would take a lot of participation by people who posted once and never returned to raise the median karma above 1.
On really successful sites such as StackOverflow, the ratio is even less favorable; over 92% almost 85% of StackOverflow users have 1 reputation.
To work around this problem, you could simply change the calculation to be the median karma of users who have more than 1 karma.
For askbot.org, if you were to exclude all 1-karma users from the median calculation, you'd end up probably with a U value between 50 and 60 (as of the time this was posted, although it would be interesting to see if this changes over time).
This is a very interesting idea, but you would need to exclude a significant subset of the user base when calculating U.
Based on my own observations of various Q&A sites including StackExchange, askbot.org and my hosted site, the median karma/reputation amount (i.e. minimum amount of karma to be in the top 50%) tends to be 1.
For example, on askbot.org, as much as 60% of the user base have only 1 karma — it would take a lot of participation by people who posted once and never returned to raise the median karma above 1.
On really successful sites such as StackOverflow, the ratio is even less favorable; almost 85% of StackOverflow users have 1 reputation.
To work around this problem, you could simply change the calculation to be the median karma of users who have more than 1 karma.
For askbot.org, if you were to exclude all 1-karma users from the median calculation, you'd end up probably with a U value between 50 and 60 (as of the time this was posted, although it would be interesting to see if this changes over time).