I was wondering what the structure and the repartition of reputation on Stack Overflow is?

A list of interesting questions:

  • What's the average reputation per user?

  • What's the standard deviation?

  • What's the reputation of the first decile of users?

Ideally, a tool like op.gg would be welcome, with a split per language, tag, and country.

  • 4
    The vast majority of users have 1 reputation, so that would hideously shmoosh the results unless you factor that in somehow... But what's the use case?
    – Davy M
    Jun 30 '19 at 19:40
  • Pure curiosity! As well as understanding reputation management from Stack top management.. May be interesting regarding other fields of study, mainly Economy, Sociology and Politics. Jun 30 '19 at 19:41
  • 12
    You shouldn't be using blockquote formatting for something that's not a quote. Nor code formatting for something that's not code. And the book reference is quite irrelevant in this context. And the site's name is "Stack Overflow", not "StackOverflow". No need to link to it, we know what site you are talking about. Tried to help you with an edit, but I see you rolled it back. Suit yourself.
    – yivi
    Jun 30 '19 at 19:43
  • I've seen your edit yivi, but I found it ugly, and unreadable. Thanks though for suggestion. Furthermore, I don't consider any book illustration as irrelevant. Jun 30 '19 at 19:45
  • 6
    You can dig up this information for yourself using the public data dump, available on the Data Explorer. Also see the very related questions: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/281147/… and meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/272749/…
    – Cody Gray Mod
    Jun 30 '19 at 19:51

It's rather easy to get this information from the Stack Exchange Data Explorer - that is when you know how PERCENTILE_CONT works and why they made the decision to have it return multiple rows.

This SEDE query tells you the answers:

  • Average reputation: 107.25
  • Standard deviation: 2307.07
  • First decile: 50

A split per language, tag or country is more difficult for various reasons: the daily reputation cap makes it harder to find out for which tag(s) users earned reputation; not everybody has their country in their profile, etc.

Note that SEDE is updated once a week, on Sunday morning. Feel free to fork the query to experiment, and take the awesome tutorial if you're new to SEDE or SQL in general.

A while ago, I created a nice graph showing the reputation distribution on a log-log scale. It does bear some resemblance to the distribution of wealth in the real world.

People always talk about, reputation. I don't care about your other graphs, just be good to me.

The logarithms are base-10, so the 2.0 on the x-axis corresponds to 102 = 100 reputation and there are about 104 = 10,000 users with this much reputation.

  • Awesome!! The last question asked also gathered -59 downvotes, for some strange reasons... What is the abscissa and ordinate legend? What's the red arrow representing ? Jun 30 '19 at 20:08
  • 5
    That question gathered so many downvotes since it started with a false premise and an author who insisted they were right. I'll update the answer with a legend.
    – Glorfindel
    Jun 30 '19 at 20:10

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