[Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

Sat Jul 17 20:43:45 UTC 2004

On Saturday, July 17, 2004, at 08:48  AM, Neil Harris wrote:
>>
>> 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
>

I support the yes/no only option. I think that some users will tend to 
be more generous or scathing in their ratings than others; not everyone 
will assign the same number to the same degree of approval or 
disapproval. I think we'll get truer results if individuals have to 
vote yes/no, and then those results are aggregated.

On the other hand, if we have to have numeric scaling, I would suggest 
a scale of 0 to 5 instead of 0 to 10 as a compromise. This would let 
people give more fine grained feedback while hopefully reducing the 
variation in scores based on the vagaries of individuals' emotions, 
namely how strongly they feel for or against an article.

-- Wesley