Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Abilities progress meter ahead of expected progress

+4
−0

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. Well, how close I'd be to Vote on Holds if I actually wrote posts in Writing. ↩︎

  2. Just to experiment, I've changed the numerator and denominator to see what would give me 83%: 30/36 is about 0.83 and 33/40 is 0.825, which could round up to 83%. ↩︎

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

0 comment threads

1 answer

+4
−0

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].


  1. 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. ↩︎

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

Wilson Score (2 comments)

Sign up to answer this question »