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In lugnet.admin.general, Thomas Main writes:
> [...] The newsgroup rating system would be simpler for me if there were
> less choices...and I think it would be more objective (of course the
> recommendations page would also address this problem).
Do you mean that from the point of view of a producer or a consumer of the
rating information (or both)?
As a producer of ratings, it is certainly your right to treat the rating
levels more coarsely if that helps you produce ratings more comfortably or
more quickly or more meaningfully to you. In other words, if you wanted,
you could apply this approach:
- Liked it: mark it High (100 -- the rightmost choice)
- Didn't like it: mark it Low (0 -- the leftmost choice)
- No opinion: leave it blank
The system is designed to work whether people always rate 0 or 100 and never
use anything in between (ultra-coarse), or whether they use the 11-point scale
from 0 to 100 by 10's (moderately coarse), or whether they use the 101-point
scale from 0 to 100 by 1's (very fine). (There's currently no interface which
actually uses the whole range 0 to 100 by 1's, but the system will handle it
if someone wrote a custom client to submit fine-grained ratings. The finer-
grained ratings will be more useful for things like sets and websites, of
course, and not too useful for news articles since they are so temporal.)
As a consumer of ratings, any method for calculating a rating which averages
input ends up producing some sort of multi-position scale. That is, even if
only two inputs are is 0 and 100, the average of several values still might be
something anywhere in-between such as 57 or 83.
As a consumer of ratings, would it help you more or less if the output had
fewer degrees of freedom? Siskel & Ebert used a 5-degree system for rating
movies: -2, -1, 0, +1, +2. Other rating methods include use 4-star or 5-star
systems and some of these even output 8 or 10 positions by giving halfs as well
as wholes (i.e., "3 1/2 stars"). Then there's the classic primary-school
rating system of A, B, C, D, F, sometimes with +'s and -'s, giving a 15-point
scale. And then there's the classic secondary-school rating system of a 0 to
4 (or 5) point system producing extremely detailed average GPA's with 4
significant digits.
Giving a two-digit rating 0 to 100 which is intuitive in the sense of a
percentage seems like the simplest general-purpose way to go for something
where the domain of input (articles) spans the entire emotions-range from
incredibly exciting to incredibly disgusting.
Would you find it useful as a consumer or producer of ratings if you had the
option to specify how many choices (radio buttons) you saw when you rated
messages and how many scale-steps you saw when you viewed ratings?
--Todd
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: the latest news
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| (...) I think both would be useful... (...) And the few times I have used the system...that's the way I've used it. I marked a few articles I read at "100" -- I don't think I would ever rate an article "0" though...I only rate things that I think (...) (24 years ago, 18-Apr-00, to lugnet.admin.general) !
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: the latest news
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| In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes: <snip> (...) Yes, that's a great idea. <snip> (...) words, (...) Yes, I think that would alleviate the perception that certain people don't approve of the posts someone else is making...I like the idea of (...) (24 years ago, 18-Apr-00, to lugnet.admin.general) !
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