[maemo-community] Reforming Karma

[From: Simon Pickering]

> On Friday 03 October 2008 12:06:58 Andrew Flegg wrote:
>
>> I like sqrt(N), but probably X * sqrt(K * N), rather than X * K *
>> sqrt(N) (where K is small to take into account number of lines IRC
>> need more to be considered valuable), and X is the overall weighting
>> of IRC contribution.
>
> As most aspects of Karma are quantity driven, I suppose it would make sense,
> to estimate the average numbers of lines in a mailing list post and bring
> those to a similar level. In this way I would consider 10-20 lines on IRC the
> same as one mailing list post. Again, keep in mind that neither mailing list
> nor IRC can be measured in quality, just in quantity.

Ah, but perhaps the quality could also be measured some way (these are  
just suggestions, they are all flawed):

* number of follow-up posts to an initial email (i.e. interest) -  
perhaps with additional scoring for starting a thread with more  
follow-ups. May cause issues for Darius-like threads, but these are  
likely to be minor.

* number of posts from a given author to a given email thread (i.e.  
involvement in said thread).

For IRC it was mentioned that both the number of lines written by a  
user as well as the number of lines addressed to a user might be a  
useful metric to rate both a user's direct involvement (the number of  
lines they write and that are written to them shortly after they have  
spoken) and their overall contribution to the community (how much  
people talk about them, when they have not typed anything for a while,  
for instance).

Presumably we should ignore any lines which include the words "ping"  
or "pong" ;)

Cheers,


Simon