On favorites – very cool. I imagine a “my rated articles” page for users. This will serve as the first “favorites” page, and will encourage people to rate articles. Will evolve as it grows (and as people’s lists grow).

Good points about searching. I think that is the mandatory first thing to implement, and the mashups will improve the “learn something new” use case.

I like Eddie The Editor. Basically the guy who gets a per-article feed from wikipedia on his topic of expertise and polices the article for errors. He’s definitely a guy we want here! The question is, is he a guy we will actually have here? I don’t know if we should include him as “wishful thinking.”

Also – great point about “dead links.” I think that will be an nth-order problem to resolve relative to other functionality, but thanks for putting it on the stack.

Rating the reviews/comments does seem to have a lot of support :) It will definitely happen – maybe not in the first release

For anyone else who sees a comment “dissappear” after submitting it – PLEASE send me an email when this happens. Your comment may have gone into the moderation queue (might be spam), which I will definitely find. Or it may have gone into Akismet’s spam-bucket, along with a couple hundred spam-comments per day. I WILL NOT FIND IT in that mess if you don’t let me know.

Browse an Area:
Answer: I don’t think our niche is so dynamic or focused that I need to know about things just after they happened. I can live without a “what’s hot?” feature. I suggest that an 1-click way for individual users to use links to what they need most frequently (“favorites”).

Search for a Topic:
This also concerns the “kind” of article, like “overview”, “10 most helpful hints” or “impact of A on B”. If I was new to a topic, I’d probably start with some overviewish articles.

Rate an Article:
On recategorization: Maybe we have another persona here, Eddy the Editor. He corrects spelling errors, merges synonym categories, and cares about under-categorized articles.
Thought: what happens with changed links or delete articles?

Comment on an Article:
Thought: “Was this comment useful?” helps with sorting the comments for display.

Suggest An Article:
On forcing the users to rate: maybe yes, in order reach a critical mass of idicators for relevance, what would support finding useful articles.

Search for a Topic:
This also concerns the “kind” of article, like “overview”, “10 most helpful hints” or “impact of A on B”. If I was new to a topic, I’d probably start with some overviewish articles.

Rate an Article:
On recategorization: Maybe we have another persona here, Eddy the Editor. He corrects spelling errors, merges synonym categories, and cares about under-categorized articles.
Thought: what happens with changed links or delete articles?

Comment on an Article:
Thought: “Was this comment useful?” helps with sorting the comments for display.

Suggest An Article:
On forcing the users to rate: maybe yes, in order reach a critical mass of idicators for relevance, what would support finding useful articles.

Great point about not requiring people to rate before commenting. You’ve convinced me :). Also – some great suggestions about ways to rate the articles with metrics other than explicit ratings.

I’ve also been thinking about some way to “weight” the ratings people give based on the credibility of the person making the statement about the article – for example, if people tend to make similar ratings as you, your opinion is more credible. Not sure how to do this so that it doesn’t become a group-think exercise. Will be a fun math problem. Or maybe just a presentation challenge – putting stars next to keep contributors or “thought leaders” (whatever that means).

I’m not sure it is in your best interest to require a person to rate an article before commenting. For some people, there is a level of stress associating with ‘grading’ an article. They may feel more comfortable leaving a qualitative comment rather than a rating. If you require someone rate an article first, they may not bother with the commenting, and the site looses a potentially valuable contribution. Alternatively – you could look at some softer kinds of rating systems like ability to flag an article as ‘tried this and it worked’ or ‘tried this and it didn’t work’ or something like that.

To ensure you still have a way to figure out which are the ‘best’ articles if you don’t require rating, you could use a combination of statistics.
For example – how many times the article was read, how many comments, how many ratings (good or bad). I probably would want to read an article that had alot of comments associated with it – even if the comments were negative or mixed, because obviously there is something to be learned (an idea to stay away from for example) if alot of people felt inspired to comment on it.

Finally (sorry for the long ramble) are users rating the article .. or the topic of the Article ? If the article is on some agile development technique, are users rating the article poorly because the article is poorly written and doesn’t help you to understand how to use the technique or because they think the technique itself is a bad idea. Perhaps it doesn’t matter – but maybe something to think about.