Should posting on Meta affect reputation?
When we launched this community, we did not yet have the ability to set different reputation grants for different categories. We've had this for a while but we failed to follow up before now, sorry.
Do you want us to change posts on Meta to not award rep for upvotes or subtract it for downvotes? This change would be retroactive, though not immediately -- the next time a certain custodial script runs, reputation levels would be adjusted to remove rep gained from Meta.
Update 2023-09-05: This question has one highly-voted answer and no visible disagreement, so barring any objections in the next day or two, I'll plan to remove meta rep by the end of the week. I'll update here when I do, or if a reason arises not to.
Update 2023-09-14: I've made the configuration change. A recalculation script still needs to run, after which everyone's reputation will reflect only votes from Q&A and not from Meta. This might take a couple days; we'll tag status-complete when that's done.
1 answer
Although my reputation would shrink substantially if that change were implemented ;) , I think it is the right choice to prevent votes on meta from affecting the reputation.
The reason is that the very existence of this summary indicator can only be justified (cf. discussions on whether reputation was a good idea to begin with) if it reflects the quality of the posts on the subject of the site - and therefore the community assessment whether a contributor is knowledgeable or not.
The activity on Meta on the other hand indicates how much a user is involved in the community, e.g. how we deal with special situations, or supporting the maintenance of the codebase on which the site rests. These are certainly excellent qualities, but they reflect a different aspect of the user's activity which is not the primary concern for someone who comes here in seeking answers for a specific problem with a Linux(oid) system. Also, votes on Meta questions are prone to being an expression of agreement/disagreement with the statement put up for discussion rather than the quality of the question, which defeats the purpose of "reputation" gained that way to indicate the quality of the contribution to the site.
It might be reasonable to have two sets of reputation, one for a site and another one for its meta, for situations in which it is desirable to assess the amount of "involvement" of a user in the site's community - but again, votes on Meta Q&A are often an expression on agreement/disagreement, so this may not work in the first place.
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