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