At 12:31 PM 7/16/2004 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Magnus Manske wrote:
Now, the rapid change of wikipedia articles
unveils this problem:
* Does the second approval need to be for the *same version* as the
first, or can it be for a later one, which then gets the "seal of
approval"?
It should be essentially for the same one, except for corrections of
minor spelling errors or typos.
Users who approve a version of an article would likely watchlist it,
so it doesn't seem like a major imposition to require them to review
newer edits and give approval to newer versions if need be. Perhaps
even have the software create a sort of parallel specialized watchlist
that shows articles you've approved in the past that have had edits
performed on them since then, both to make sure one doesn't forget to
watchlist them and to make sure one's regular watchlist doesn't become
cluttered.
Also,
should there be
* yes/no approval(s)
* or rather a rating (0-9 or something)
The numerical rating has much merit. and an average rating can be
generated as a composite of these.
Users should only have the yes/no option, IMO, since including or
excluding an article is an all-or-nothing proposition. Combining
multiple users' ratings into a more fine-grained number could be
handy, though, showing whether the approval is controversial at a
glance. The details of this rating system will no doubt be the subject
of endless bickering, which I look forward to seeing the end result of. :)
I disagree. I believe that most users would prefer the ability to
express shades of opinion. A numerical rating allows more information to
be gathered; users who want to assert an all-or-nothing opinion can
still vote 0 or 10. I would then suggest feeding the results to a robust
estimator (using the median would be a good first hack) to prodice a
fine-grained estimate. It would also be useful to have a robust spread
measure to detect contentious articles.
By having a wide range of fine-grained estimates, and perhaps adding in
factors for linkage, we can then prune the encyclopedia to any desired
size by adjusting the threshold for inclusion.
-- Neil