On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 18:22, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com wrote:
To be honest I'm not particularly worried if people canvass their mates to give straight 5s to an obscure article that only a few hundred people will ever notice. I would anticipate that will happen whenever someone files an AFD on an article that is of interest to a particular fansite, and if anything it will be less disruptive to have a bunch of fans boost the articles ratings than it will be to deal with those same fans at the AFD. The positive ratings that really matter to editors on this site are things like FA and GA and I don't see this system replacing that.
I think the important think about the article feedback tool is that hopefully it will allow WikiProjects to prioritise article improvements. Let's say you are involved with WikiProject Philosophy: it'd be really useful to get a list of all the philosophy articles with article feedback statistics mixed in. If we have an article that is getting very variable ratings, going up and down all over the place, that's a useful measure for having passionate readers. If there's an article with organically occurring high ratings from the readers, that is something the WikiProject should collectively consider pushing towards Good Article or Featured Article.
The problem is we get the 'Bieber problem': people voting on the basis of their views of the article's subject rather than the article, so people who love Justin Bieber upvote it and people who loathe him downvote it, even though we are asking whether they think the article is good. The negative side is worse here: people downvoting the article as a kind of 'delete' vote - they think that saying the article is poor quality because we are giving too much coverage to a subject we shouldn't be giving coverage to.
There is a good side though: we can use the different categories quite usefully. If we have an article that is highly rated in three of the four criteria but not so well rated in another, that's potentially something we could flag up to WikiProjects as an area for improvement.
The article feedback tool is just that... a tool we can use to feed back into the project. It shouldn't ever be an end in itself.