What is "Reputation"?

Here is a question from a humble Initiate. What is a node's “Reputation”? It is mentioned in the Voting/Experience System but never defined.

I did a search for "node" and "experience" in the relevant sections, and found RE: Beginnings of the Voting Experience System which indicates that reputation is listed with the title. But, I only see the reputation of the one I posted, not anything else. On the search results itself, it would be handy to know which were more reputable and read those first, for example. Other things I've read here indicate that this is what's supposed to happen. Can someone set me straight?

I found that my posting had a reputation of 11. Since that's the only one I've seen, I don't know if that's good, bad, or indifferent. I think it's slightly good, because the voting page says the average is 9.1, but I really don't have any other context.

—John

Comment on What is "Reputation"?

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Re: What is "Reputation"? by Masem (Monsignor) on May 16, 2001 at 23:10 UTC
Reputation is the number of ++ votes placed for an article, minus the number of -- votes placed for the same article. In other words, think of a node's rep as saying "at least X people agree this is a good node" (assuming X is positive...) Reputation is invisible unless you own the node, you've voted on the node, or it's on special pages. This helps to prevent artifical inflation of votes or personality voting in some cases. Basically, if you saw a really good node, and before you voted you saw that it had a 100 reputation, would you still vote for it, even if the node was that great? Keeping it hidden helps to reward those nodes that are extremely valuable to the PM community. If you want to get an idea of the range of reps that we have, I suggest you look at Best Nodes and Worst Nodes. Particular good is a daily mediation on the Best Nodes of the day. You'll notice that right now, the highest rep is above 200, while there are highly negative nodes as well, but those deserve what they get. I don't believe the searches return anything by reputation order; if anything, it's by forward date order. The best thing to do if you are looking for the best advice on a topic is to use the Super Search (much more selective than the titlebar search), find articles that appear to be root nodes (eg, are not preceded by 'Re:'), and look through the entire discussion on those nodes. Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com \|\| "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain	[reply]
(kudra: order by rep) Re2: What is "Reputation"? by kudra (Vicar) on May 16, 2001 at 23:17 UTC
Although it's not a search mechanism, you can see nodes ordered by reputation in 2 ways. The first is on the list of a user's nodes, where you can view by lowest or by highest reputation first. The second way is to go to your user settings and select to view notes by reputation rather than chronological. That will allow you to see which reply to a given post has the highest reputation.	[reply]
Re: Re: What is "Reputation"? by chipmunk (Parson) on May 16, 2001 at 23:23 UTC
By the way, you can search only root nodes in Super Search by checking types other than 'Note'.	[reply]
What is "Reputation"? by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on May 16, 2001 at 22:43 UTC
I typed the title 'what is "reputation"?' but only the "what is" showed up. It seems to have been truncated during the preview proccess, since hitting "back" shows "what is" is indeed in that box, but the full name is in my form history, so I know I typed it! —John	[reply]
Re: What is 'Reputation'? by turnstep (Parson) on May 16, 2001 at 22:51 UTC
It's because HTML uses quotes to delimit values, such as `<INPUT TYPE="Foo" VALUE="bar">.` [download] The quick solution is to use single quotes.	[reply] [d/l]
so it is a bug by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on May 16, 2001 at 22:55 UTC
Ah, I see. So the Engine is not escaping that out when it generates the VALUE attribute in the HTML, and it gets messed up. Thanks. —John	[reply]


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