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In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes:
> 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)?
I think both would be useful...
>
> 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
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 are really important (who
cares if I think something is really *not* important...I guess I just don't
like to spend too much time focusing on the negative). One thing I really
don't understand is who goes to the trouble of rating articles that everyone
realizes are not important....like maybe the "me too" posts (in general groups,
not the new LEGO ones) or auction posts that just convey information about an
auction. To me, it seems like a big waste of time on the part of the person
rating.
>
> 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.
I realize this...and that's fine...I think the resulting "average" is more
representational of the entire group's opinions, rather than the "weighted"
opinions of one or two persons who chose to use coarse versus fine rating
scale. For instance...since folks have the option of rating a post "60" and
most people will take advantage of the available options and rate things in the
gray area between 0 and 100. If I continue to just dole out "100s" that's
skewing the average and it's not fair. I either have to ask for a simpler
system or try to use the "fine" system as it's intended.
>
> 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
As a consumer, I'd rather not see the ratings at all ;) Usually I read LUGNET
through a newsreader, so I don't see the ratings, but occasionally I peek at
the web page and see that this or that article was rated a certain way and I
think, "Wow, someone has a lot of extra time on their hands," or "Why would
someone rate this article so low," or "Wow, that rating seems petty and
vindictive to me...I wonder who is doing all this rating anyway?"
As a producer...well, I think it's best if I don't rate posts because I don't
want to mess up averages by giving out 100s and I don't want to have to think a
long time to try to come up with a number between 0 and 100 (particularly, if,
you're like me and would rate the same message "40" one day and "60" another
depending on when you read it, what you were thinking about at the time, and
all the other random things that contribute to scoring subjectively.)
--
Thomas Main
main@appstate.edu
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: the latest news
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| (...) I just thought of a way to alleviate this problem. Don't publish the average rating unless there are at least N values (N = 10?). If there are fewer than that many values, just say "insufficient sample" or something like that. That way only (...) (24 years ago, 18-Apr-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Article rating (was: Re: the latest news)
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| (...) Probably depends on how quickly they can rate articles. Through the website, it's a little cumbersome to give input on everything -- a lot of scrolling and mouse-clicking and waiting, etc. But using a custom newsreader client, it can be as (...) (24 years ago, 18-Apr-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: the latest news
|
| (...) 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 (...) (24 years ago, 18-Apr-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
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