[WikiEN-l] Article Feedback - Ramp up to 10% of Articles

[David Gerard]

On 14 July 2011 18:01, MuZemike <muzemike at 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.