I think that a rating system -- so many stars -- can only be effective if there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of raters. Otherwise the variation between 'what I think is worth 5 stars' and 'what somebody else does' is too large to make even non-trollish responses meaningful. I am thinking about the rating system that amazon has for its books.
I find it useful to read the reviews, sometimes, but never the number of stars. Practically every technical book that I consider excellent has some readers who rank it poorly; while many books I consider rubbish get high marks. Some of this reflects my personal taste in technical books 'give me a concise summary rather than an encyclopedia, please' but mostly this reflects how well or poorly the goals the author of the book had when writing the book fit my goaks in reading the book. The weirder the thing is that I wanted to do, the less useful, in general, I found the book, as is only to be expected. There are two great problems I see with a perfectly working rating system. The first is that people tend to use it instead of developing their own judgment. If there are X packages out there for doing something, one can sympathise with a desire to know 'which one is the best' -- but it is rare that you can get an answer to this question outside of the context of 'and what do you intend to do with it?'. So-and-so is simpler, such-and-such is more complete, this one runs very quickly but eats memory like a pig, while that one is tiny but slow; which one you prefer depends on what you are doing. The second problem is related to the first. If, by some chance, one of the X packages gets great reviews by its first users, it will look better than its alternates to the casual browser, who will then choose it. Thus you can generate momentum rather easily this way, even when the preferred package is arguably one of the weakest of the choices. Conversely, a great package that has been reviewed by some exacting people -- or some people who tried to use it for something for which it was not suited -- may be skipped over in favour of an inferior package. I don't think that anything can substitute for developing one's own judgement, and mechanisms that attempt to do so should be resisted because they damage all of us in the long run. Laura _______________________________________________ Catalog-SIG mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/catalog-sig
