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An interesting measure of a question is not only the total number of views and the total number of upvotes, but their quotient. I (as a user) can calculated this quotient in mind - given the two numbers - but would find it better to be given it directly: prominently, and at first sight.

Other opinions?

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    $\begingroup$ Is the ratio actually useful? I would think it says just as much about the quality of the title, as it does the quality of the question. $\endgroup$
    – user7530
    Feb 21, 2013 at 1:33
  • $\begingroup$ @Jacob Sad, but true. One-dimensional votes are so limited that they provide little if any value. Ideally, one would like to be able to do things like: order the answers by most insightful, as voted by my peers, or as voted be experts on the topic, etc. But, alas, SE has no way to do that (it's not rocket science - it would be easy to implement). $\endgroup$
    – Math Gems
    Feb 21, 2013 at 15:18
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    $\begingroup$ @MathGems: Weren't you going to develop a whole new platform for math forums? $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Feb 21, 2013 at 19:00

2 Answers 2

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I looked up the top questions according to this ratio (among 100+ views questions with a score of 5+). As user7530 predicted, the leaders are generally good, but not necessarily fantastic, questions with specific titles. Putting (rather long) in the title is a winning move in this game. Top 5:

  1. Paracompactness of CW complexes (rather long)
  2. How low can the approval rating of a majority candidate be?
  3. Do we really know the reliability of PrimeQ[n] (for $n>10^{16}$)?
  4. Evaluate $\sum_{k=1}^{\infty} \frac{k^2-1}{k^4+k^2+1}$
  5. Smallest order for finite group that needs many elements to generate it
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    $\begingroup$ +1 nice query... $\endgroup$
    – draks ...
    Feb 21, 2013 at 11:35
  • $\begingroup$ Maybe I should have said the query wasn't mine, but I guess that's clear from it being over a year old. // Of course, now that this post links to the questions, it will eventually increase their view counts and probably drop them from the leaderboard. $\endgroup$
    – user53153
    Feb 21, 2013 at 17:51
  • $\begingroup$ very mean of you... $\endgroup$
    – draks ...
    Feb 21, 2013 at 19:42
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I can sort of see what the idea would be, but wouldn't the denominator need to be the number of times the question was shown to a user who has enough reputation to vote? (Otherwise a good question would drop in your ranking simply by being linked from Reddit). And this number is not public knowledge and probably not even remembered by the system.

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