[maemo-community] Reforming Karma

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi,

Andrew Flegg wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 4:50 PM, Dave Neary <dneary at maemo.org> wrote:
> The only problem here is people changing their nicks, hence the IRC
> field on someone's profile probably needs to handle comma-separated
> nicks (or we discourage changing nicks anyway).

Agree on discouraging :)

>> How would we translate that to karma?
> 
> 0.0001 karma point per line, or something? Perhaps a log scale for
> those who have *way* too much time.

+1 on a log or power rule. sqrt is fine, not quite as brutal as log2.

N	sqrt(N)	log2(N)
1	1	1
5	2	3
10	3	4
50	7	6
100	10	7
1000	31	10
10000	100	14

>> A karmabot that keeps count & updates the midgard database daily?
> 
> That would be one approach. mgedmin's already doing it, though.

I always suspected mgedmin was a bot... thanks for the confirmation ;)

> But that's a scaling factor. Introducing a maximum's saying "we value
> this contribution, but - once you've done it X times - you might as
> well stop".

Just so I'm not misunderstood - this is a maximum number of points per
blog entry, not a maximum number of blogging points, that I'm proposing.

> For example, when karma was introduced it was suggested that it could
> be used to help determine who might get any future potential device
> programme discounts. a) this should favour people who are currently
> more active than were just *very* active 3 years ago; b) it should be
> possible to eye the top 50-100-200 karma ratings for any tweak and say
> "does this roughly look like the names I'd expect to see"?

It would be nice to depreciate karma over time but right now it's not
incremental - you don't get new karma points for what you did this last
week, every night your entire karma contribution is recalculated (this
takes about 90 minutes for everyone these days, I believe).

The easiest thing to do if we did incremental karma would be to multiply
everyone's existing karma by a factor (say 0.8) on a given date every
year. That way, stuff you did 2 years ago is worth only 0.64 times what
you do today. But since the system doesn't' work that way, and I believe
it'd be a big job to convert it to that, I don't think the return on
investment is there.

Not knowing midgard, I'm guessing here, but if we did store karma in a
database table, we could duplicate the table on a given date, and
generate a second list "karma points this year" by subtracting karma at
the beginning of the year from karma on a given day? Seems like that
wouldn't be too hard, and would give a way of seeing current activity,
but without depreciating old karma.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
Jabber: bolsh at jabber.org