Dungeons and Dragons Wiki talk:Rating Articles

Old Discussions
Discussions about the RC replacement and subsequent granularity votes can be found at the archive. - Tarkisflux Talk 03:38, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

User Sandbox, But No User
Ambidexterity, DaTedinator Variant (3.5e Feat) has met the criteria for being sandboxed, but there's no user attached to it! Where do we put the sandbox? Do we just delete the page, since the author is not a community member and therefore not terribly likely to show up and fix it? --DanielDraco 07:40, 15 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Havvy moved it over, you could send it back to him and let him decide if he wanted to try to get it updated or just removed. Otherwise, deletion would be the only option I think. - Tarkisflux Talk 15:57, 15 August 2012 (UTC)


 * I'm fine with deletion. Surgo 16:03, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Mobile device problems
Clicking the "rate" button doesn't work properly when viewing the site on an iPad or Blackberry, and may not work for other mobile devices as well. Is there any way to fix this?


 * I think it's built on javascript, so any browser that doesn't support that wouldn't work. I don't know if there's a way to fix that actually. You could do a manual rate if you wanted though. - Tarkisflux Talk 21:49, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Community Favored/Opposed Averages
I think the goalposts for CommFav and CommOpposed are too tight. If we loosened the rating average by 0.25 in each direction, more articles which should fit in each category actually fit in there. --Havvy (talk) 18:23, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I agree with this and wholeheartedly support it. It feels too easy for a single outlier to change things at the moment. --Ghostwheel (talk) 18:24, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I'd be more interested in having a CommDisdained image for articles under about 1.5, rather than loosening the limit for CommOpposed. That way it can be immediately obvious that the article isn't very popular without having to destroy it outright. --Foxwarrior (talk) 19:12, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I disagree, particularly since the reason for changing it seems to be that some people think that some articles should fall into those categories and aren't because other people disagree with them in their own ratings. The point was to keep them tight and force a strong consensus for an article to land in one of those groups and allow outliers to push them out of them. That is working as intended and discussed, and I continue to support it.


 * So while I don't really care if we opened up the favorites a bit, I am not really for it either and would vote against it because I want a degree of exclusivity among those articles since they're competing for main page advertising space. But I am pretty opposed to opening up the bottom end as proposed, particularly given the current trend of people opposing things before offering constructive advice or opposing on fluff grounds (instead of simply disliking). The articles already show a low score (which we can show on nav now if people want to), and moving them out as a result of the current rating trends + easier kicking seems dickish and exclusionary. Neither of which are conducive to the sort of community building that people say they want to counter the complained about slowness.


 * So if a display change isn't enough for people who want more stuff removed or highlighted, I'd like to see a better constructed argument in favor of changes. The downsides outweigh the upsides IMO.


 * As to Fox's suggestion, that sort of summarized rating was voted down last time I proposed it. If people want to revisit it we can of course. - Tarkisflux Talk 19:49, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I agree with Tark. The limits are where they should be. For the amount of rating that we get, we get about as many CommX articles as we probably should. I, for one, have not seen any articles which are generally favored by the community which have not become CommFaves, except by virtue of just nobody bothering to rate them. The ones that fail to fall into a category are the ones where no consensus exists, or where the consensus is decidedly unenthused in whichever direction it points. That's exactly the way it should be. --DanielDraco (talk) 20:22, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I feel like it would be a good idea to broaden it if CommFave and CommOpp were marks of "good article" and "bad article". But they're not. There are and should be good articles which are not CommFaves. That category is not for favorites of 25% of the community which everyone else kind of likes. It's for the best of the best as seen through the eyes of the majority. They are the articles that we can all come together and say, "Yes, this is a damn good example of what we want to see on this wiki." As is, we can already get CommFaves with only 50% of voters actually wanting it to become a CommFave. It should not drop below that. --DanielDraco (talk) 20:34, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Isn't it supposed to be that 3.0 - 3.5 is liked, and 0.5 - 1 is disliked? Or is it broader than that? --Ghostwheel (talk) 16:08, 1 June 2013 (UTC)


 * It's broader than that, with 2.5 - 3.5 being liked and 1.5 - 0.5 being disliked (which boils down to liked or disliked on average). These numbers are in line with those proposed by Fox above and Havvy below. - Tarkisflux Talk 16:12, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Additional Rating Pictures
Alright, that didn't work so well. Let's try something else. Right now we have three images: opposed, rated, and favored. Let's change that up. We have names for our ratings, so add pictures for being +/- 0.5 from the value shown. For example, opposed would still be 0-0.5, but we'd show a dislike pic for 0.5-1.5 and neutral for 1.5 to 2.5. --Havvy (talk) 20:43, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Completely fine with that. It's a recode, but not a particularly hard one. - Tarkisflux Talk 21:33, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I want to add that this is not only for selfish reasons--in fact, it would change one of my own feelings about an article to become commfav when it wouldn't otherwise be. --Ghostwheel (talk) 22:48, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Take my prior statement as a preemptive vote for Havvy's additional image suggestion and similar variations thereof. --Foxwarrior (talk) 22:57, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Yeah, that sounds fine. A more informative display is never a bad thing. --DanielDraco (talk) 03:36, 2 March 2013 (UTC)


 * We have a bunch of community favorites that won't even show up in the rotation because lack of blurbs and images. I haven't even written blurbs for two of my own because I can't find fitting images. Surgo (talk) 03:52, 2 March 2013 (UTC)


 * There doesn't seem to be any objections to this, so I think we can get on it. I'll go make a request for art and get started on the re-code in a bit. - Tarkisflux Talk 23:28, 5 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Re-code done, new art added (thanks Gan!), and the additional visuals are now live. Please let me know if there are any bugs.


 * Additionally, the rating is now a property of the page and can be displayed in navigation on lists if we want to. If anyone wants to do that, I can teach you how to add it. - Tarkisflux Talk 05:16, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Anonymous Ratings
So the issue has come up of whether we want anonymous ratings to be allowed. We chatted about it a bit in IRC and TF asked me to post some of the points raised against it so other people can agree or refute as they see fit. I'm just going to do it in bulletpoint for sake of ease. It has also been noted that ratings from unregistered users under a dummy name might very slightly mitigate one or two of these issues, but not to any satisfactory degree. --DanielDraco (talk) 00:27, 24 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The lack of a singular, unified identity tied to them
 * The fact that they are the easiest (though not the only) way to sneak multiple ratings from the same user onto an article
 * The brief registration process would be a good deterrent against troll ratings and hasty ratings from much-too-casual users
 * A registered user is one more likely to stick around and discuss their rating.


 * Here are some points for it:
 * Lower barrier to ratings means more ratings and more casual user friendly in general.
 * Unregistered ratings allow people another way to dip into the site (in addition to talk page discussions and anonymous article contribution) and convert to registered user later. This assumes that conversion is a more effective population building tool than feature gating though, and I'm not sure that's actually true.


 * In response to DD's security points, we don't actually have ballot stuffing, troll ratings, or poor ratings from passersby to worry about at the moment, so the need to defend against them isn't well supported. I get the worry, but solving a potential future problem that may never even happen doesn't seem particularly compelling to me since it comes at an accessibility and openness cost.


 * I think this is likely to come down on community building decisions, and on those I have a preference for the continuity of a registered user name. It also makes it much easier to direct attention to responses with user talk pages instead of article talk pages, which is something that I see a lot more often than we have IPs rate. Which kind of sucks in this specific case because the IP who started this discussion would be excluded as a result :-( - Tarkisflux Talk 18:36, 24 July 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm of the opinion that people should register before rating for the reasons DD stated, and also for the reason that if they invest more into the system (even if it's a few more minutes), they're more likely to be an active part of the community, rather than just saying something and leaving after a single rating. Furthermore, it's not like IP ratings are a major part of the rating system, so it wouldn't be a big downside either. --Ghostwheel (talk) 22:23, 25 July 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't see problems with allowing IP users to rate. Sure, the odds of having a dialog with them might be a bit low, but the whole point of a rating system is to get opinions. Some of those opinions might seem stupid to the author of the article and the author might want to discuss it, but even if that never happens, at least the author will get some feedback so they can either solidify their own opinion ("yes, I made this the right way") or see something they need to change. And if the author is upset about an IP rating throwing off their article's "score", they can just ask some of the regulars to go rate it to perhaps put the score where the general community thinks it ought to be. I don't think censoring opinions that go against the general consensus or that seem dumb is a good idea.


 * Also, I agree that security concerns aren't really an issue and probably won't be. It's not like sockpuppeting is impossible anyways, so I don't see IPs offering any threat that registering can't already do (if maybe a little less convenient).


 * As for it creating more active members... Well, I think that's not necessarily a great assumption. My initial experiences with the old D&D wiki was as an IP user for a while. I wanted to get used to how to comment on a wiki and such before I made an identity for myself. I wouldn't have joined just to rate if there had been a rating system. So, there's at least one counterexample to what you are suggesting, Ghostwheel. Whether it's more likely either way: I don't know. --Aarnott (talk) 22:29, 25 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Surgo and Aarnott are for IP rating while DD and Ghost are against, and I don't really want to block out the only IP we have who is currently rating. So in the absence of more people wanting to restrict ratings and the lack of problems with the current open system, I think we might as well leave it as is for now. Tying down later is easy enough after all. - Tarkisflux Talk 20:08, 26 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Just a bump before I tweak DD's policy writeup in a few days. As things stand IPs will be allowed to rate. They probably don't have the same expectation of permanency as registered users (because IPs can change, but that seems extremely unlikely) and should convert their ratings if they ever do register, but that's minor policy writeup stuff. - Tarkisflux Talk 22:42, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Removing and Blocking Ratings
Okay, let's talk about more of this policy stuff.

I have been told that there are users who feel that a negative rating with insufficient detail is unfair in that it offers the author no ability for the author to adjust the page to address the criticism and request a re-rate or apply the OldVersion tag. That doesn't seem like an unfair complaint (if one with a few other logical extensions that I'll get to shortly). I'm wondering how people feel about allowing an admin (and only an admin, because edit wars) to remove a rating upon request from the author if they agree that it is insufficiently specific and the rater has failed to respond to requests to clarification. Yes, I said remove and not block because the OldVersion tag is specifically there to delineate one that the author is blocking for the stated reasons no longer applying, not one that failed to specify actual reasons and was dealt with by an admin. It seems like the sort of case where we'd want an admin to step in and agree that it was a crap or inappropriate rating per policy, instead of just a user dispute. We could do a new tag instead, but I don't really want multiple blocked ratings tags floating around confusing people looking at the ratings.

Other things that seem unfair for similar reasons: continuing to include non-updated ratings two years after the migration. The RC system didn't include a negative rating and doesn't actually hurt articles (but may be blocking some actually negative ratings), but the anyone registered like/neutral/dislike system does actually hold articles back when they aren't updated. I'd like to remove all of them for consistency sake, and to retire the tag associated with them. It's been 2 years, people really should have dealt with them by now to be fair to the articles that they're attached to. Unless there's really strenuous objections from a lot of people, I'm just going to pull them all. - Tarkisflux Talk 05:01, 27 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Fine, fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine... how does one find their old ratings in order to update them? :-P --Ghostwheel (talk) 05:49, 27 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Yours are still linked on your talk page Ghost (you have a category with them and everything). Opinions on the other removal proposal? - Tarkisflux Talk 06:52, 27 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Better than letting one or two ratings that have no actual basis destroy a good article's ability to get more press via commfav. --Ghostwheel (talk) 07:27, 27 July 2013 (UTC)


 * My post prompted this, but just for the sake of unity I'll note here too that I agree that this is a good procedure to put in place. I would suggest that it include a request on the rater's talk page for clarification, followed by some amount of time (3 days maybe, to be shorter than the CommX grace period) for the rater to respond and clarify. And holy crap, we still have legacy ratings? Yeah, let's get rid of those. --DanielDraco (talk) 07:47, 27 July 2013 (UTC)


 * 3 days seems short to me, but I'm often on the long side of these sorts of things. And yes DD, you still have legacy ratings. - Tarkisflux Talk 07:51, 27 July 2013 (UTC)


 * I agree with DD on the 3 days thing, for three reasons; first, 3 days is FOREVER on the Internet, second it gives people an incentive to stick around and be part of the discussion, and because it can always be reversed. And yes. --Ghostwheel (talk) 08:10, 27 July 2013 (UTC)


 * I actually like people waiting longer than FOREVER to make these sorts of changes and would prefer 7 days to match with the CommOpp policy, but I can live with 3 days.


 * How do people feel about removing non-updated OldVersioned ratings? If we went forward with it at all, I'd want to wait 7+ days from user talk notification of the OldVersioning. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but if we're opening the door to removal for these other reasons it seemed like the sort of thing we may as well discuss. - Tarkisflux Talk 17:15, 27 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Actually deleting outdated ratings only sounds twice as sensible to me as deleting outdated discussions, that is, still not very sensible. Changing the template to make them look grayed out or something could be good though. --Foxwarrior (talk) 17:28, 27 July 2013 (UTC)


 * My main reasoning for 3 days is preicsely that the CommOpp grace period is 7 days. If a user gives a 0/4 rating that pushes the average down to 0.5, then the next day the author sees it and contests it because there is no explanation given, giving the rater 7 days or more to respond will mean that the article will be pushed into CommOpp before the rating can be removed. I guess we could just not allow an article to be pushed in or out of CommX by a rating with an unresolved contest against it, but that would A) provide a stalling tactic for butthurt authors and B) be more or less tantamount to just letting the author nullify it before allowing time to respond. I stand by 3 days as a good timeframe.


 * I am generally against removing anything from talk pages ever without archiving it. So I'm going to support Fox's idea here and say that OldVersioned ratings should be grayed out to be more visibly not applicable, but not removed.


 * I could have sworn I updated all my legacy ratings a long time ago. I'll get on that now. --DanielDraco (talk) 23:33, 27 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Graying out is easy (well, it's another re-code, but whatever), and a better idea anyway. So let's do that. Your position suggests that you would prefer blocking insufficiently descriptive ratings on articles rather than removing them via admin. Is that the case and you would prefer a new blocking tag, or are the situations sufficiently different as to allow removal? - Tarkisflux Talk 04:07, 28 July 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm generally against removal of any ratings, but not strongly opinionated enough to argue it if this is not a popular opinion. --DanielDraco (talk) 01:49, 30 July 2013 (UTC)


 * It seems to be just us in here, and non-removal was already suggested by Fox. So it's at least 50% popular. I don't mind supporting that over straight removal, which I'm also generally against. It's another tag, but those bother me much less in the grayed out scenario so I'm not worried about it. - Tarkisflux Talk  06:20, 30 July 2013 (UTC)


 * And a bump here before I update more policies and rewrite the rating template again. Current position is for a new rating block reason that the author can apply after 3 days if they do not receive clarification after requesting such on the rater's talk page. And for the template to do a better job of showing which ratings are being blocked by changing the color scheme instead of just adding a disclaimer. It's live in a few days if we don't see some objections. - Tarkisflux Talk 22:47, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Rating: "For Reasons Given Above"
Alone this should not be a valid reason to rate an article one way or the other. Referencing and agreeing to points below are relevant. But a rating should always add something to why it was rated in the manner chosen - and be given a personal touch that shows the article was looked into. --Franken Kesey (talk) 20:24, 5 August 2013 (UTC)


 * No. If someone has expressed my feelings clearly and fully and I have nothing to add, then I have nothing to add apart from agreeing with them. --Ghostwheel (talk) 20:56, 5 August 2013 (UTC)


 * And if someone's reason was: "Because its stupid." then three others: "For reasons given above." It should not be community opposed. No one took the time to work with the page. A rating is just as much a contribution to this wiki as an article is, there is no use in ten people making ten of the same versions.


 * As per policy, ratings must be validated with reasoning of some kind. It doesn't matter if its in the rating or the rater points to material elsewhere on the talk page (like from an earlier post discussing the article or the talk page of a similar article in a series for that matter). This is acceptable if less convenient in some cases of long discussions because people are lazy and reading ratings should be clear. Some raters don't like to express the same thoughts over again and waste people's time with redundancy on what's already been said (which itself reduces clarity, and again, people are lazy). Now, if the reasoning wasn't given or was for some reason invalid, then yeah, those ratings get struck. We already do that. Did you just hear a bell? 'Cause I just chimed in. --Ganteka Future (talk) 22:52, 5 August 2013 (UTC)


 * A rating is not as much a contribution to the wiki as the article is, and if someone writes an exhaustive rating (or commentary) of an article I see no reason to tell someone they are not allowed to second that opinion. I've rated articles with lots of positive or thorough negative reviews, and trying to find something new to add is non-trivial. While I prefer to write my reasons down, requiring that is a barrier to new ratings that I'm not interested in raising.


 * To your specific concern, vacuous ratings will be blockable based on being insufficiently clear (see above discussion) if the rater fails to provide additional details. And so would any ratings based on them. The case you are concerned about will be a non-issue shortly (and opposing for being 'stupid' instead of merely disliking might even run afoul of our merits requirement). - Tarkisflux Talk 23:04, 5 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Grayed out ratings are now live. Parameter was changed from |OldVersion to |block to reflect different mission. Currently will accept |block=NewVersion and |block=InsufficientExplanation, can add more if we determine that these are insufficient. Editing article now. - Tarkisflux Talk 07:43, 17 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Good, very good. Thank you --Franken Kesey (talk) 14:51, 17 August 2013 (UTC)