Comments on: APR: Thoughts on Ratings

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:03:28 +0000

Definitely will show the level of attention that the articles are getting. Imagine that ABC each represent 100 articles. The challenge is that the C articles would push the A&B articles off the top of the list.

By: Rolf

Rolf — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 05:34:02 +0000

On A, B, and C – why don’t we just show the number of votes. Maybe the reader herself has the best algorithm to decide what she thinks is good. This might help overcome the problem of A having been available for voting for the longest period of time.

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 04:43:03 +0000

On rereading Rolf’s comment – two articles with a score of “4″ may be very different.

Article A has “4 as an average of 100 votes”
Article B has “4 as an average of 10 votes”

A is likely “better than” B.

But what about article C with “4.5 as an average of 10 votes”?
C is better than B. Is C better than A?

Was it Mao that said “Quantity has a quality of its own”? Until we come up with a better solution, quantity of votes will be a tie-breaker for equivalently scored articles.

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 03:44:56 +0000

Good inputs Craig – thanks!

Really interesting idea – have some notion of authorship incorporated into the site.

I was initially thinking that if people rate the reviews that others give, then the aggregate review scores could be incorporated into the weighting of the reviewer’s scoring of other articles. This might serve as an incentive to people to give quality reviews of articles (so that their vote “matters more” when they score articles.

Basically, by writing good reviews (useful, accurate), you get rewarded by other users of the site, and your opinion becomes quantitatively more important. There may even be a way to promote your skill level, along the lines of forums that “reclassify” you based on the number of posts you make – but based on quality more than quantity.

By: Craig

Craig — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 01:32:33 +0000

I think IMDB also weights/normalises people’s votes. For exaple if all users give an average vite of 6 nd my average vote is 8 my vote will show up as an 8 when you look at how I vte, but the movie’s overall rating is adjusted for my abberent voting behaviour.

I was also wondering whether you would weight authors votes. For example if my articles were rated high would my rating of other’s article be weighted based upon my expert view?

Cheers
Craig

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:05:39 +0000

Cool, thanks Rolf for the feedback.

By: Rolf

Rolf — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 09:58:43 +0000

I like the presentation and function of the Tyner Blain ratings: quick and easy.
On negative reviews: I believe there will be only a small number of them, because if I read a bad article, propability is high that I don’t read all the way through, and that I don’t want to spend more time with it. bad articles will simply be not rated high.