In the grand scheme of things, do ratings of Wiki-sourced content work?
Traditionally, ratings systems are a mechanism that provide a quick, painless, and easily deployable way of soliciting and collecting opinions from a community of users. The ratings can be thought of as a combination of 3 values: the item being rated, the person providing the rating, and the ratings data itself. For content that is more static in nature, there is much less chance of ratings data becoming obsolete due to the underlying content of the page changing.
In other words, my opinions about the quality and accuracy of the information on a Web page that doesn't change are probably going to still be valid in the future (unless my initial ratings data was skewed by a misunderstanding of the information upon first encounter, but even then I should be able to rectify that by updating my original rating).
However, in a more dynamic and fluid environment like a wiki, the content is much more likely to have multiple edits applied to it as the content evolves, and my ratings for past revisions might not necessarily be applicable to present/future revisions of the content. In this type of scenario, what value do ratings bring to the table and how should their life cycle be managed? Do we take the ratings data at face value with no respect to the time line of revisions? Or should ratings be a more fluid data set that is respective to time (for example, only ratings that were acquired between revision X and revision Y are included in the aggregation for said revision)? Should wiki ratings systems only apply to ratings of contributors and not their individual contributions?
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this!
Happy computing.
Michael Beaver | 17 March 2008 03:33:32 PM ET | Raleigh, NC | Comments (1)
