[thesite] how many ratings to appear in sidebar?

[Martin]

On Thursday, January 17, 2002, at 02:47  pm, aardvark wrote:

>> must've been someone else. (a couple more 4's and 5's since i last
>> looked).
>
> can you do me a favor?
>
> that article languished at 4 ratings forever... and then it makes it
> into the top ratings list and gets another 4 ratings in a couple
> days...
>
> can you send me a screen shot (with names blocked out) of the
> admin sidebar with the rating dates?

hmm - I wonder if there's a case for enabling authors to see the
ratings given to them with names removed, so they can get the
feedback of "Oh, most people think my article is fantastic, but
I got one outlying point which skewed the mean rating"

Or even to disregard outliers when calculating the mean
(it's a common statistical methodology)

> i think this is an interesting example of how the articles list is a 
> self-
> perpetuating model, and i'm intrigued by the effect of the UI
> element we've created that elevates those articles...

Also as those articles have fantastic Google rankings, they
get traffic into the site, which means more visitors, which means
more ratings etc.

The more ratings an article has, though, the harder it is to
knock off long-term, as each new rating has less effect.

>> i've finally got one of my articles in there -- you think i'm gonna
>> let some stat write-up junk push me back out? ...
>
> bring it

Which is another thing - getting mentioned on thelist gets traffic
to the article, and more ratings. Naturally, only good articles tend
to get mentioned, so new ratings will tend to be good ones, although
there's always someone who will violently disagree with the points
and/or want to make a bitchy point by low-rating an article.

Cheers
Martin
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