Question

How does the "Top contributors this week" section work?

The "Top contributors this week" section on Socratic changed on 12/10/2015. The post below explains the update.

Answer 1

The "Top contributors this week" section (which looks like this) should celebrate the folks who are best helping make Socratic a better place to learn.

What helps make a subject on Socratic a better place to learn? Visiting that subject often and contributing stellar answers.

Previously, this section was ordered by karma, meaning the contributor with the most karma in the subject got the top spot.

However, karma is not only based on how many answers you write or edits you make—it also accounts for how many likes your answers have.

While you can control how many answers you write, you can't control how many likes your answers get. In a perfect world, all good answers would get lots of hearts. But, thanks to Google's mysterious ranking algorithm, some answers get more visits from students than others (and thus get more likes).

As a result, this section wasn't a great reflection of who was doing great stuff to make this subject awesome.

So we updated this section to no longer be ordered by karma, something you can't control, to something you can control: how many days you contribute to Socratic in a week.

If you are tied with someone else (say you've both contributed 3 days this week), the tiebreaker is how many contributions you've made this week.

We hope this will be a better reflection of who's doing great stuff on Socratic. Let us know what you think in the comments!