Note that many of the high voted questions are big-lists which are CW so I'm not counting them into the whole reputation argument anyway.

Secondly, there are many under-voted questions as well. This is again a result of the system's design and will not change if we move to SE 2.0; furthermore the fact reputation is higher on MO is better for those under-voted questions, as they award the asker twice the reputation they would get otherwise!

I think that well formed and interesting questions are equally useful for this site as the answer they may attract. The people who make this community are mostly researchers, and good questions can stimulate and help with the formation of new ideas and new research.

I would contend that certain types of question get upvoted out of proportion to their actual worth. Also, "stone soup", as I used to say in the earlier days of MO.

I also disagree about your main point. I think that well formed and interesting questions are equally useful for this site as the answer they may attract. The people who make this community are mostly researchers, and good questions can stimulate and help with the formation of new ideas and new research.

(in fairness I have to admit that most of my reputation comes from questions just as well)

There is also the point that on MO reputation doesn't mean too much except perhaps as an indication of "how active you are (were)".

I am not saying anything about the true value of questions, since I find it rather hard to evaluate. I am just observing that if a reasonably well-received question doesn't produce an answer, then the site might not be attracting the right people to answer it. This in turn might adversely affect the quality of the questions, because people might begin to think that their questions are unlikely to be answered anyway.

Again, let me make doubly sure that I am not misunderstood. The last sentence does not apply to me at all. Actually, the one answer I got from Noah already made the question worth asking. I am just speculating on the connection between the problem Ben is pointing out and the "problem" that I as a newcomer have experienced myself.

Alex: I think that Ben was arguing about true value not about votes (not that I wish to imply that your questions had no true value!). For example, I think that for the questions that I've asked, the actual worth of the question is roughly inversely proportional to the number of votes it got. To paraphrase my previous remark, it's really easy to ask a popular question. It's hard to ask a good question.

I am not sure about that. The two problems should be strongly related because if the site is to attract good questions then it's by offering a high chance of getting a good answer. My personal experience is: I have asked three questions in the past three weeks. They got between 8 and 23 votes each, so can be considered reasonably good, as judged by the community. But two of them didn't attract any answers at all and one of them received an excellent answer treating a special case. I would also say that Noah Snyder, who was the author of that answer didn't nearly get the votes he deserved. The question was natural and got me 23 votes, while the answer clearly required some thinking on Noah's part and is very pretty, but only received 5 upvotes. So my (very limited) experience is almost opposite to Ben's.

I think of most of my MO reputation as ill-gotten gains

Agree with Ben here -- I have many more "ill-gotten" points from trivial answers which got inappropriate numbers of upvotes than anything involving my questions. In fact, I think it might be the case that every question I've asked has taken me more time and effort than every answer I've given.

I try to click on the Hunger Site pages each day and, presumably by way of encouragement, they have "wise quotes" on their pages. I have a suspicion that the selection of these is a perpetration of that common "all dogs have four legs, my cat has four legs, therefore my dog is a cat" fallacy that we all know and ... know ... from grading homeworks; namely, "Wise sayings are too deep for me to understand, I don't understand this saying, therefore it's wise.". One of the current crop is:

Children can ask questions that wise men cannot answer.

Which anyone in the neighbourhood of a kid aged around 6 will respond with, "Tell me something I didn't know!".

The difficult thing is not to ask a question that no-one can answer - that's trivial. The difficult thing to to ask a question that someone can answer, but that nonetheless is interesting and that you - the questioner- can't answer.

I can't say I agree; at the moment, I think MO running out of good questions is a much more serious concern than running out of good answers. So, while I understand the impulse to see answering as more of a "contribution" than asking, I think it sets up the wrong incentive structure (though arguably, what people choose to vote up creates the wrong incentive structure as well).

The ony change is that now they will not be asked in CW mode.

(I shan't be sorry to see big-list questions made harder to ask ...)

http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/941/community-wiki-checkbox-disappeared/

Edit: and another, in case anyone is still evaluating the merits of SE 2.0. Sufficiently high-rep users have access to the total up- and down-vote counts of questions and answers, which is strictly more useful than knowing only their difference.

One interesting difference which is not so immediately apparent (especially if you don't ask questions; I recently asked my first question on the site): an upvoted answer still conveys +10, but an upvoted question is only +5. That's a big reweighting towards answering versus asking questions, and I think I like it.

Actually, proper mathematics support should be very easy on OSQA since it is written in python. I have the iTeX bindings for python, and by using a couple of other libraries it is possible to do convert iTeX into MathML, SVG, or PNG depending on the capability of the browser. Now that is near-optimal, IMHO.

It would probably be very easy to do this, if anyone wants it.

Nice Job! $\mbox{}$

or something like that :)

Another annoying thing: You can no longer cheat the lower limit on characters by adding a bunch of spaces in between your words (Try it on MO! It's great!).

A concrete example:

Nice Job! contains too few characters to be posted as a comment, but Nice Job! is detected as over 15 characters. You cannot, however, pad your comment/answer/question with whitespace on the leading or trailing end, as these spaces are not picked up as legit characters.

A lot of the things in SE/SE2.0 are hardcoded in, but different communities want different things. Certainly a user with enough reputation can be trusted to leave comments that are only one character long if necessary. Similarly, users with enough reputation should be able to edit comments for longer than five minutes. The community or administrator should be able to decide such things. This is why moving to OSQA would be far more useful than moving to SE2.0.

OSQA, once the bugs are worked out, seems like it would be a much better fit for MO than SE2.0.

The two things mentioned here so far don't seem so bad to me.

Noah: Only for the 5 minutes after it is posted.

Is it just me, or is the migration to SE2.0 looking less and less interesting the more we learn about it?!

I think we on MO should make a list of things that work differently, negative or positive, on SE2.0 (those of us who have used it a bit). This should be considered if and when we are offered a migration deal.