Jimmy Wales (jwales(a)wikia.com) [050524 22:33]:
This is a research project, an exploration of whether
such a tool might
be useful to us in quality control, and we really want to avoid making a
game of it.
At the moment the average rating is accessible. Hopefully that will keep
people's interest up and won't create too much observer effect. And, of
course, all votes will be as public as people's edits are.
Perhaps the data from anons will be useless
nonsense,
perhaps it will be noisy but highly informative about articles where we
don't have enough community members to give feedback, perhaps it will be
astoundingly good in every possible way. :-) We won't know unless we
collect it.
I suspect most anon data will actually be quite okay - there will obviously
be vote spamming, but we can look at the data and see what it takes to
clear most of that. I do think most readers will rate in good faith, like
on Yahoo! News/Pictures or whatever.
And if spammers write scripts to do what David
suggests here, then we
may consider this a small victory. Distracting spammers into wasting
time in a wholly useless and harmless activity is surely a service to
humanity.
I was expecting things more like calls-to-action. The sort of thing we see
now, except when we get calls-to-action to recruit editors, it has a
noticeable tendency to produce new good Wikipedians ;-)
- d.