On 14 July 2011 18:01, MuZemike <muzemike(a)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.