[codinghorror]

Worth a try in the name of science, but I'm pessimistic about the ability of machine learning to measure subjective "quality" of a question.

In the best case you'll end up with a txtspeak and Proper English detector. But I knew that already.

[DanBC]

I'd be interested to see if there's any predictors for "good quality" questions vs anything else. Some research project for students, perhaps.

I remember reading something about telling the difference between truthful and fake reviews.

(http://cornellsun.com/section/news/content/2011/09/23/cornel...)

There's more literature in this paper.

(http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/publications/WWW-2012-group-spam...)

[mmcnickle]

I think a useful metric will be the time-to-first-answer and rate of submitted answers. These will be the answers to badly-researched questions á la "How do I get all the buttons on this page?[jQuery]".

Unfortunately, that is a post-question signal, and won't be able to be used in the context of the competition.