On Jul 14, 2011, at 10:11 AM, David Gerard wrote: > On 14 July 2011 18:01, MuZemike <muzem...@gmail.com> 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 > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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