The "X out of X readers found this review useful" is very helpful.
Using the same Amazon example, when you click See Reviews on a
product, they show you a great thing: they put the most helpful and
higher review aside the most helpful and lower review.
--
Alvaro
On 14-01-2009, at 21:59, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Ian Woollard wrote:
On 14/01/2009, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Not everybody pays attention to GA/FA. A public
rating system where
anyone can rate each article on a 0-10 scale might be
controversial to
implement, but on a cumulative basis would give a good statistically
based valuation of the article.
Possibly not. The experience with these kinds of systems at Amazon
for
example shows that interpreting votes is not simple. A lot of people
give consistently high, middle or low votes and there are many
pathologies, averaging them out gives much worse results than you
could expect.
Sure, optimists may very well score everything high, and pessimists
may
score everything low. Still, the overall results will tend toward
some
mean value. probably higher the expected value of 5.0 that one might
anticipate before we have any real data. If the overall mean migrates
to say 5.7 other interpretations of data can be adjusted accordingly.
We don't interpret individual votes, but overall data.
In our involvement with Wikipedia we have accepted the principle that
anybody can write an encyclopedia article. Choosing a number
between 0
and 10 is a somewhat easier task. Can we not accept that the vast
majority will approach such a task with the same level of
responsibility?
Yes, there will be some individuals determined to vote stupidly, but
one
of the wonders of a statistical approach is that those efforts are
soon
marginalized.
Ec
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