[WikiEN-l] Just to throw this out there...

[Daniel Ehrenberg]

--- Peter Bartlett <pcb21 at btconnect.com> wrote:
> 
> Erik wrote:
> >On a wiki, we risk "flagging wars", and by defining
> what "can be  
> >considered offensive" we are leaving NPOV behind.
> 
> One possibility is that each user has the option to
> give a page a score
> : 1 meaning "Doesn't need filtering" through to 10
> "Nearly everyone
> would want to filter this". Then the overall 'score'
> for a page is the
> average of all scores users have given it. Then
> someone browsing the
> 'pedia could choose to filter at a particular score
> e.g. browse at 0
> (filter everything with an score of more than 0 i.e.
> everything!) to 10
> (= filter articles with average score 10 i.e.
> nothing!). 11 viewing
> configurations available to the user... I believe
> Google only has 3!
> 
> Because each person/ip could only cast one score per
> article (though of
> course they could change their score as the article
> changes) "flagging
> wars" would be difficult because it would require
> ip-hopping/multiple-log-in to try to tip the score
> in a particular
> direction. 
> 
> This idea may be computationally quite feasible...
> we already have to
> store everyone who's watching an article... maybe we
> could store
> everyone who's scoring an article too. (Watchlist
> has a tag saying
> "article changed since you last scored" etc).
> 
> Obviously the idea extends to other scores too...
> instead of a "filter
> score" you could have a "quality score" and users
> could browse only
> articles that on average believed to be high
> quality. 
> 
> Obvious disadvantage : The filter is "1-dimensional"
> i.e. you can't
> filter on sex, religion whatever... only on the
> score... so if religion
> were to get scores of about 5 and sex 7.. to filter
> religion you would
> have to filter sex too.. I don't know if it can be
> made to fit with team
> certification idea.
>  
> Anyhow these are only implementational ideas. My
> personal view is that
> any sort of filtering along these lines is going to
> take effort on the
> part of users.. perhaps we should stick to writing
> the encyclopedia for
> now!
> 
> Pete

That sounds like a very good idea, but how would
people deal with unrated pages? Let's say all of the
unmodified rambot pages were unrated. Then no one with
any sort of filtering could go there. If someone made
a rating bot to solve this, it would seriously
undermine the system.

A way to (partially) solve this could be to have a
period wherein people can rate pages (and are required
to in each edit) but ratings cannot yet be used for
filtering.

Overall, it's a good idea but not practical.
--LittleDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com