In a message of Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:50:41 +0100, "M.-A. Lemburg" writes: >Laura Creighton wrote: <snip> >I wouldn't generalize that. I've often found information >in those reviews that was otherwise hard to find. >My overall experience with the Amazon system is more on >the positive side.
I think that the reviews are worthwhile. It is the *rating* that I think distorts things. <snip> >Discussions on newsgroups, user reports in blogs, etc. are >far more informative than an eBay style rating system. > >Perhaps requiring at least 50 words for the comment would >help ;-) Maybe. The thing about an eBay rating is that there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people making the rating, and the rating is just about one thing 'this person is trustworthy, i.e. reliably ships things that arrive undamaged and are more or less what I thought I was bidding on'. The people who had a bad experience because they didn't understand what they were buying can be overwhelmed by those who had a good experience -- assuming you do a lot of business you can cancel those bad reports out fairly quickly. This is rather different from 'I wanted to parse some XML and I tried this parser and it didn't work for me'. Why not? Maybe you got a SAX parser and you were looking for a DOM parser, but are still ignorant enough to not know what you ought to be looking for. I think that only detailed descriptions about what you wanted to do and how it did or didn't work for you can be useful for the next potential user of the package. A rating system will only mislead people. And they make it inevitable that people will make comparisons between packages where they ought not to be made. Laura > >-- >Marc-Andre Lemburg >eGenix.com _______________________________________________ Catalog-SIG mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/catalog-sig
