[Tutor] keyboard interrupt

[Steven D'Aprano]

On 26/05/13 17:57, Marc Tompkins wrote:
> On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 7:19 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>wrote:
>
> You can edit *other* people's questions and answers??!??!??
>>
>> What. The. Hell.
>
>
> The idea is to build an authoritative information resource (in particular,
> the goal is that the accepted answer to any given question will become the
> primary result for someone Googling that same question.)  So it makes very
> good sense that both questions and answers can be edited for quality, and
> the result is (mostly) good.

That's all very well and good when you're dealing with a system like Wikipedia, where edits belong to the entire community, not the person who merely made the edit. But Stackoverflow is specifically in the form of Question/Answer, where both questions and answers are labelled as belonging to the person who made them. Stackoverflow has the form of a conversation, with questions and *replies*. How can you judge the quality of a response when you cannot be sure that the question you are reading is the same question that was answered? Your reputation depends on the relevance of your reply. Change the question, and your perfectly sensible, helpful reply may look like an idiot's waffling:


Q: How do I sort a list without using any built-in functions or methods?
A: Start at this Wikipedia page, where many different sort-algorithms are listed.


# Question gets edited.
Q: How do I count the number of 0's, 1's and 2's in a list without using any built-in functions or methods?
A: Start at this Wikipedia page, where many different sort-algorithms are listed.


And now I look like a first degree moron. By the way, I am not making this scenario up. Read this thread starting here:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2013-May/647400.html


> My objection is to people gaming the system - making imperceptible edits
> like dashes-to-em-dashes - in order to juice their scores.

So these edits aren't default-deny, but default-accept? Worse and worse.




-- 
Steven