One of the more controversial aspects of the transition to MO2.0, for myself at least, was the reduction in the reputation added for upvotes on questions asked from +10 to +5, while retaining the reputation for answer upvotes at +10. I doubt there is any way to change this, but I would be interested in whether we can establish its effect.
There is a school of thought (to which I subscribe) that holds that the purpose of answers is to ask better questions, and questions rather than answers are primary. Voltaire, for example, said "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers".
For myself, on a completely personal level, I have noticed that I am less motivated now to ask well thought-out questions because they are "worth less". Is this experience shared? Can it be quantified?
Also, the research of Yla R. Tausczik and collaborators correlated high "real-life reputation" with good questions, but not necessarily with good answers. Again, are these further statistics to back this up?
In particular, interesting statistics might include:
- Do people ask better questions when they get more reputation for an upvote (relative to answer reputation)? Can this be quantified in a useful way?
- How strong is the correlation noted by Tausczik et al. between real-life reputation and question quality?
- Are good answers leading to better questions? When MO answers are motivated by MO questions, are they better questions if the former questions have better answers? Do highly upvoted answers tend to lead to questions?
- Is mathematics special in regard to the above, or would the same conclusions hold for other fields of human knowledge?
- Which other statistics, besides those mentioned above, might be used to test the philosophical/ sociological theory that "a good question is better than a good answer" (maybe this is really a question for sociology Q&A site (^_^) ).