I've noticed, in looking at many "big-list" questions marked CW (community wiki), as well as other similar questions, that some of the best answers appear at the end. I believe this is because the system causes the number of up-votes an answer gets to be dependent at least as much on how early it is posted as on its quality. I believe this for the following reason:

Answers are ordered by how many up-votes that answer has. Answers posted later (i.e. once a few good answers already have a number of up-votes) are seen by much fewer people, since few people actually scroll to the second page or even to the bottom. When an answer is seen by more people, it will, on average, get more up-votes, regardless of how good it is. If an answer is near the bottom, few people will see it, so even if everyone who sees it decides to up-vote it, it will still get few up-votes. I don't mean to say that really bad answers get up-voted. I just mean to say that any answer above a certain threshold of quality will get up-voted early-on if it gets posted early. Then, because that answer is already at the top, it will get even more up-votes in a kind of exponential pattern.

Yes, you might think this happens if an answer is posted weeks or months later. But even after a day or two, there are usually already enough answers with many up-votes that a very good answer posted then will get many fewer up-votes that an answer that is still good but not necessarily quite as good.

The result is that in threads like this with many answers, the number of up-votes that a post gets is much more dependent on when it is posted than how good it is. This is true *even* if "when it is posted" is referring to time margins of only a couple days.


I apologize, first of all, if this has been discussed, as I don't frequent the meta.

Second of all, I don't really have a good solution, and I recognize this is a difficult issue to solve. I decided to post this simply because I would like to begin a discussion. That being said, here are a few rough ideas for solutions. I say *rough* since many of them have cons, and some of them are quite wild. Feel free to post a variation on any of these ideas, or suggest a totally different idea.

* Order posts on CW questions using a combination of number of votes and recentness
* Prevent voting on questions for the first 2-3 days
* Do the same as above, but only if the question is marked "CW" AND has the "big-list" tag
* Have "random" sorting of questions for the first 2-3 days
* Some variation combining the above
* A user with some amount (say, 2000+) of reputation has the option to "bump" an answer to the top, or to the first page, for a day
* A user can bump their answer in exchange for some amount of reputation. If the answer gets a lot of votes within a certain amount of time (showing that the answer was actually good and was neglected because of how deep it was), that user regains the reputation.

Wow, oops, I never realized you could do that. Now I'm not sure whether I agree with this.