An alternative could be to have a sliding window,
whereby only votes in the last month or so counts - that way votes based on old
revisions age out of the system. Trouble is if a page is infrequently edited then votes
should last longer (since what was voted
upon a while ago will probably still be similar to the current revision), and if a page
is infrequently voted upon then votes should
last longer too (because otherwise your sample size will so small that just the last few
votes will be able to totally skew the
ratings).
Those are good points. It would be neat to use diffs to calculate how
much an article has changed between edits, so if you voted 3 on a stub
that was entirely rewritten (nothing in the original version was
contained in the current version) your vote would have a weight of 0%,
and if I voted 4 on a version that was only 50% different than the
current version, my vote would have a weight of 50%. This would be
hard to do on a per request basis, but would be easy to do on a daily
basis and store the results in an intermediate table.
Awesome,
thanks.
By the way, I might have just missed it, but if I haven't you might also want to
include something somewhere about which license or
licenses you're releasing your extension under ;-)
I hadn't thought that far ahead! What license are Wikipedia extensions
usually released with? GPL?