On 14 July 2011 18:01, MuZemike muzemike@gmail.com wrote:
However, you've made a good point there about "gaming the system" and intentionally trying to garner high ratings. For example, one could create a horrid piece of crap article which would have no chance of staying on Wikipedia and canvass his/her buddies to flood said piece of crap with 5.0's across the board. This thing precisely happens from time to time on YouTube. I don't know how this could be prevented, but I acknowledge that even this feedback system, as with all others, are not perfect and comes with systemic flaws.
There are various ways to mitigate these effects, e.g. cut off the top and bottom 10% of ratings when calculating the displayed numbers.
But the essential problem is [[Goodhart's law]]: once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role.
So the answer is not to take the ratings *too* seriously for purposes of writing the encyclopedia.
- d.