On 14 July 2011 18:01, MuZemike <[email protected]> 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. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
