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Abilities progress meter ahead of expected progress
I'm confused about the numbers in a progress-tracker for abilities. On Writing, there's a lot of spam. I've flagged a lot of spam. I have (for those who can see) 30 helpful flags. On a whim, I went to the Vote on Holds ability page to see how close I would be to it.[1]
Here's what's weird. The text at the bottom of Vote on Holds says a minimum of 40 helpful flags are required, and a 95% helpful rate. But the progress meter up at the top says I'm 83% of the way there. 30 / 40 is only 75%.[2]
What's going on? Is the abilities page hardcoded with a number that is not filled in from the site configuration? Or is there weird extra math?
1 answer
The way the site does the percentage, like most things on this site, is based on Wilson scoring, which uses fake data points to bias scores towards the center. The site is currently configured to add +2 positive and +2 negative, so given P positive and N negative, your ratio is (P + 2) / (P + N + 4).
Given this, we need to determine how many flags 95% is. In an ideal scenario, we have zero actual unhelpful flags, meaning we just have the two fake ones. We can work out the math to find that you need 38 helpful / 40 total flags, or 36 real helpful flags.
Since you have 30 already, you are 30/36 or about 83% of the way there, which is what is displayed[1].
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This is technically a simplification because this is the ideal case with no unhelpful flags, but it's accurate for this case. When not in the ideal case, intuition somewhat starts breaking down for the formula used. ↩︎
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