Why Ratings Are Not Objective.

Then why did I suddenly, within a few minutes, drop from 4.3 to 2.9 on this thread where a string of ones suddenly showed up?

Maybe they were from differnt members? Maybe someone made several new accounts in order to vote more then one time? Percy explained it to us as Granny explained it to you. So, either Percy is wrong, or one of the scenario's I just mentioned happened.

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I hunt for the truthI am the one Orgasmatron, the outstretched grasping hand
My image is of agony, my servants rape the land
Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain
Two thousand years of misery, of torture in my name
Hypocrisy made paramount, paranoia the law
My name is called religion, sadistic, sacred whore.
-Lyrics by Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead

i'll try and be good... i might get lucky

ignore the rating system and it goes away

Good advice, Peg. Perhaps that had a bearing on what happened then and since. In the thread in which the big dip occured, several of my counterparts were not friendly. The dip came after a personal attack over my overall posting MO. In my defense I cited the good rating I had. Perhaps counterparts dogpiled to see to it that from thence on my ratings would stay down. Anyhow, other than to discuss the system, your advice is wise.

quote:

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The dip came after a personal attack over my overall posting MO. In my defense I cited the good rating I had

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In other words, someone criticised your posts. You "defended" yourself by pointing to your rating. Unfortunately for you, your rating was not earned by producing good posts, having a lot more to do with the system defaults than message ratings (as is mine - I certainly haven't earned a 4.8).Don't you see how that might have provoked someone to show just how worthless your rating really was ?

Just to reduce uncertainty, what Granny Magda described is how it works. In case it helps make it more clear, here's a simple example.Let's say I rate five of Buzsaw's messages, giving them these ratings: 5, 2, 3, 4, 3. The average of these five message ratings is 3.4, so I contribute a rating to 3.4 to Buzsaw's member rating. If I'm the only person who has rated any of Buzsaw's messages then 3.4 would be his member rating.Now let's say someone else rates five of Buzsaw's messages as follows: 5, 4, 5, 5, 3. The average of these five message ratings is 4.4. If you average 3.4 and 4.4 you get 3.9, which would be Buzsaw's new member rating.As quickly became apparent when I added message ratings, the current approach is inherently both unfair and ambiguous. The ratings are based upon opinion, which is highly subjective, and every person will judge according to their own individually selected criteria.While I wouldn't consider the current rating system a very reliable parameter upon which to judge the quality of a member's contributions, there does seem to be a correlation of higher ratings with those who discuss things they know something about or who take the time to investigate. Those who tend to put fingers in gear without taking the time to develop an appropriate level of understanding of the topic seem in general to have the lower ratings.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I'm not sure that that's entirely right, Percy. The system shows a '5' as the default member rating - and my own member rating seems implausibly high to be just derived from message ratings. I think that there is likely at least one "dummy" 5 that goes into calculating the average (because it makes more sense of the member ratings we see - and it is a good idea to include dummy ratings anyway, so that the system isn't too sensitive to the first few ratings).

Leaving aside the question of why you think the developer described his own algorithm incorrectly, you could test your theory fairly easily. Find an old thread and rate a single message of a member who hasn't been active in some time and see what it does to his rating (click the rating number you want, then click on "refresh" or "reload"). I'm betting his rating will become whatever you rate that message. You can change the rating you've assigned this message, enabling you to check the effect of any rating from 1 to 5 when there's only the single message rated for the member. Please let me know if you find a bug.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

OK, so the system really is very sensitive when only a few ratings are given. Which is, I have to say, very poor design (which is one of the reasons I doubted that it would work like that).
A system which relies on large numbers of ratings to produce meaningful results really isn't appropriate for this setting.While I wouldn't expect a system as sophisticated as Boardgame Geek's game rating system, some effort to damp down the sensitivity to the first few ratings seems almost essential - if only because it is quite likely that many people will get only a few ratings and they will tend to the extremes (people are more likely to give a '1' or a '5' than a '3').

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abe:wtf are you talking about though? Seriously, I don't recall wasting posts to smile. Links or it didn't happen.Edited by Catholic Scientist, : No reason given.

Hi, CS. I think this counts.Full rows of these......also count.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

That was actually a serious point. Michamus explained it well in Message 229.But I think I do remember just laughing at people.Still though, I think they're infrequent enough to be a negligible effect on my post rate... at least, without them it wouldn't go way down

Hi, CS. Okay, fine. I was out of line.Edited by Bluejay, : I kept the wrong smiley in the CS quote.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi Buzz,I wouldn't worry about it. I'm not a Christian but I do believe in God, and am as well a Conservative Republican who makes a living in the oil and gas industry. On top of that my son is a cavalry scout in the 10th Mountain Division and has been to Afghanistan and Iraq.I don't expect a rating above about 1.5 with the liberal loons here. If I could get my rating down to 1 or 1.1 that would be great.You know Dr.A, gets suspended all the time for next to nothing, well Onifre sent me 9 abusive posts, none of which I answered. Admin didn't do shit, just shows where their head is at.Is that fair?Well as my wife says, "If the world was fair they wouldn't have crucified Jesus Christ".Forget the rate BS, and have a good day.God BlessPetrophysics