SummitPost.org

lcarreau wrote:Thanks for your consideration, Josh! Was beginning to think you might be using a Cattle Prod on the back end of our hides ...

Even if I was, I still opened the book for the people of SummitPost to voice their opinions which does play an important role in this being implemented.

William Shakespear once said "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings".

It is amusing to me how controversial voting on Summitpost has been over the 8 years since I joined the forum. I once took it very seriously and spent a lot of time reading mountain pages, trip reports and looking at images and then carefully voting 1-10 based on the quality of the contribution and it's value to a climber/hiker. Once in awhile I come across one of my "old" votes of a 1 or 3 or 7 and notice that very few others have used the entire range of the voting scale. I used to look at every image submitted in the last 7 days on Sunday mornings and vote 10 on images I really liked or much lower if I thought they were not valuable contributions. I still look at Summitpost daily, but I now get my mountain photography "fix" on Facebook. Many of my Facebook friends are also contributors to SP and I get to see their images and read their trip reports without all of the other crap. The 10 point voting system has become exactly like Facebook...members voted 10 if they "liked" something or not at all so they would not offend someone. If you voted 8 or 9 (or lower) people would be offended. I predict that most SP users will continue to vote "5" or not at all. If that is the case you might as well just have a "LIKE" button and nothing else.

Fine. Go ahead.

+1 to what Scott says.

The problem is not so much the rating system, as a structural angst about the way the rating system really works.

I've thought about updating some of the pages on SP in the formal way; but I would much rather "update" by submitting maps or route photos with labels. There images often get few votes, because most people who go through the images each day are mainly concerned with striking pictures. That will always be the case. I really don't care if the photo has a good rating or not; but when I see a gap in information I try to fill it. You can put more information in a photo caption, than is in many of the formal route descriptions. And truth be told, it is much faster to label and upload a photo or a map, than to write an article.

The problem lies in how one searches for information through SP. If people look only at the most highly rated photos, they will never see informational maps and route images that get low ratings, especially when the attached images are more than 30 in number. Maybe if we paid more thought to the "informational" label on images (perhaps made it a button instead of an entry in a long list), the problem would be helped.

Even if one is not concerned with points, it is still a bit saddening to thing that you go through all this effort to supply information, and that information is almost never seen because it isn't pretty, and sinks to the bottom.

I've finally figured out that if you want these photos to be of use, be sure to put critical *google* oriented search words in the title and text.

I like the idea of a 5 star system versus the current system. That being said, I am not confident that it will change much voting behavior on the site - most everything is still going to get 5 stars - but it still makes sense. The hovering and/or check box seems like a nice touch as well.

Skip the half stars - and IMO round all the half votes to even (those were the rules for any .5 rounding way back when I took math classes!), but feel free to round everything up if that makes for easier programming.

Thanks Josh (and whomever else is working on the programming) for all your work keeping the site running and for making upgrades. SP is a great place! It will never be perfect, nor will you be able to keep everyone happy..but still, a great place. Happy New Year...

Josh Lewis wrote:
William Shakespear once said "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings".

Abraham Lincoln once said,

“Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”

I would probably go for the 1-10 vote with a quick method to stars

A five star voting system (no half stars please) seems to be much easier than the 1 - 10 points system. So I will not be against a change in the voting system.

But I always will have my troubles with voting 1 - 10/10 or 1 - 5/5.

The main thing for me is that I always will either vote 10 points / five stars or I will not vote at all. If I´m disappointed with a page (route / area / mountain) I will not vote e.g. 3/10, I will rather encourage the author to put some more work into it by sending a pm or a comment on that topic. Alternatively I will request the page for some revision work of myself if I know the mountain / route / area in question. There are many old mountain or route pages with poor information and few pictures on SP. Should I vote 1/5 stars or should I better do some work on them if I was lucky to master the peak or the route?

For me 10 points / 5 stars never was "outstanding" or something like that.
With 10/10 I just wanted to honour a - in my opinion or based on my personal knowlegde - "good work". As we are all individuals, "good work" can be extremely variegated and diverging.

As to voting for pictures it seems even more difficult to me. There are these incredible "eye-catchers" we all like and they end in high votes. But there are, too, many pictures which do not attract attention on their own and which are simply used to illustrate an article nicely. I, too, have uploaded many of these pics. They get no votes (or at least one) but may be extremely helpful to show a situation or a crux on a mountain / route.

Writing this I think we may do perhaps better without voting at all! We put in information on SP, we retrieve information from SP on topics we are interested in, we communicate with people who had fallen for the same crazy idea to climb mountains and some of us even have made new friends.

10 / 10 for this possibility. In my opinion its the only thing voting for.

And 1.000 thanks for the immense work to keep this page running!

Change to the 5 stars sounds best to me.......no half stars

selinunte01 wrote:The main thing for me is that I always will either vote 10 points / five stars or I will not vote at all. If I´m disappointed with a page (route / area / mountain) I will not vote e.g. 3/10, I will rather encourage the author to put some more work into it by sending a pm or a comment on that topic. ...

Voting less than 5/5 (10/10) actually is a way (the simplest way) of encouraging the author to improve the page. I have received several PMs asking for an explanation of my 6/10 or 7/10 vote so that the page can be improved. (So far only one guy has been driven crazy and voted all my pages down.) I do write comments occasionally (see e.g. here or here) but instead of constantly writing anything like “more pix/info would do” I just prefer casting an adequate vote.

The 10 or nothing voting habit developed because of the algorithm that was implemented when SP2 was rolled out. If an object with a score of 76 received a 9/10 vote, it actually lowered the score.

That's not exactly how it happened. It was more or less the other way around. The old algorithm calculated things off the average vote on SP.

As I understand it at least, at first a 9/10 would have raised the score until everyone started voting 10/10 on everything. If for example, the average vote on all SP pages would have been a 7/10, any 8/10 or higher vote would have raised the page score. People voting 10/10 on everything wasn't intended, at least not at first, and that's what messed up the algorithm. Once the average page score on SP was over 9/10, any vote lower than a 10/10 would lower the page score.

I predict that most SP users will continue to vote "5" or not at all.

Maybe, but under the old system the votes were a lot more diverse. I think it easier to differentiate a 3/5 vs a 4/5 than differentiate between a 7/10 and 8/10. People would still vote a lot of 5 stars on everything, but I still think voting will become more diverse.

Sarah the business intelligence practitioner says:
Social Acquiescence Bias: *No scale implemented on this website is going to eliminate the social acquiescence bias inherent to respondent-identified voting in the context of an online community. This bias is built into the medium, not the scale.*
Scale Conversion: Scale conversion from 10-pt to 5-pt is not as simple as it seems on the surface. Respondents/voters distribute votes in different proportions across each scale. That is - a 5 is NOT equal to a 9 or 10. And so forth.
Scale Midpoint: A benefit of the 10-pt scale is that it has no midpoint; a 5-pt scale does. Votes/responses can tend to hover over the midpoint instead of "getting off the fence" (though this may be less of an issue on SP due to to bias described above).
Benefits of the 10-pt scale include:
High level of granularity (admittedly this is a double-edged sword)
Lends itself well to decimal-based analysis (like the school grades many of us received - e.g. Mom, I brought home an 80% on my biology exam, sorry)
It is easily interpreted cross-culturally (10 fingers/toes, decimal system, metric system of measurement, Bow Derek was a "10", not a "5 star," etc.)
Full Verbal Anchoring: If we wish to eliminate the ambiguity of the 10-pt system by replacing it with a 5-pt system, then the 5-pt scale should be fully anchored verbally:
5 = Excellent
4 = ?
3 = ?
2 = ?
1 = Horrible

It's most critical to determine the definition of the 3 - shall it be a midpoint (e.g. "Average")? Or something else?


Sarah the business management consultant says:
What is the cost-benefit analysis for this initiative?
How many programmer/QA hours are involved?
What are the opportunity costs?
What features will be postponed to implement this change? Are any of those mission-critical?
Why is this change such a high priority?

Sarah the SP Member says:
Meh. Ya'll do whatcha want.

Blah, blah..... no offense Josh. Makes no difference. Those that vote 10 will vote 5. Then those that vote 9 will then hit the 4 button. It's all the same. Since the most recent change I have voted a 9 at times. Most I suspect still vote 10. A 10 is a great photo as a 5 vote will be. ...

But we ALL appreciate your work!!!!!

Please vote 10's for my photos.... I mean a 5

Sarah Simon wrote:Full Verbal Anchoring: If we wish to eliminate the ambiguity of the 10-pt system by replacing it with a 5-pt system, then the 5-pt scale should be fully anchored verbally:

Couldn't agree more.

Sarah Simon wrote:5 = Excellent

No, considering how people tend to vote: 5 = nearly very good to excellent (informative text illustrated with good photos)

Sarah Simon wrote:4 = ?
3 = ?
2 = ?
1 = Horrible

It's most critical to determine the definition of the 3 - shall it be a midpoint (e.g. "Average")? Or something else?

4 good
3 fair (OK but better info/more photos needed)
2 poor (frequent errors/hardly any info or photos)
1 rubbish

I like the quick vote, 5 star system and I agree with Liba, having it as stars rather than pure numerical vote maybe will allow us to be more precise instead of wither voting 10/10 or not voting at all.