Recommendations, Ranking, and Comments on content +3
In order for the best content to rise to the top and for me to see what other people in my friend circle (or people who I respect) recommend WE needs some form of recommendations or ranking. I'm not sure what form that should take. Something simple like Ebay? Positive, Neutral, Negative + a comment. Or like Amazon? 5Star rating + a comment. Does the WE community have any better ideas. I imagineit would take some form of scoring with a comment. Is it just a beefing up of the existing comment functionality? How would it help with searches? Would it apply to orgs, people, groups, resources, jobs, events as well as wikipages? Please provide your comments and edits to the wiki.
Follow-up:
Much of what is in this suggestion can be folded into another suggestion about rewarding user contribution which is here: Recognize/reward User contribution in Profile +6. The reality is that on WiserEarth where interactions are generally between people and content we dont want to disentangle too much the commenting on content from the way that reflects back on the user in terms of reputation. Other sites also take a similar apprach as Bowo describes below.
by angusparker
Comments (1 - 5 of 5)
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Vote system with comments system (like deliberaweb.com or others) to bulletin boards (or all kind of content), ability to tag the posts like ticket service or helpdesk (proposalDesk).
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I don't have much experience with eBay, but I like how Amazon does this.
They have double ratings actually. One for the item of interest, and another one for the comment/review (beihg helpful or not). All done with stars (one to five), with the most helpful comments rising on top. This alone has given me much insight into an item (for me, just books) and helped me to decide whether or not to buy it.
More than this simple "ratings" however, is my favourite feature called "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought...". This allows for serendipitous discoverability (as opposed to "most popular" or "highest rated") for closely related items beyond those that showed up in a search. Reinvented for WE, this should look like "Users who liked this org/group/resource/event/wikipage/job also liked..." ("liked" = gave a good rating and/or has a comment for it rated as "helpful"). The "Areas of Focus" and "Keywords" field of each entities (org, resource, etc.) should also be factored in to the algorithm.
This, coupled with another of your (Angus) suggestion, Recognize/reward User contribution in Profile, especially the "Suggestions / Requests / Ratings to administrator are lent more weight" (I just added "Ratings" there), would be nice.
That's all I can think of at the moment. More when I come up with something else. I think this is a feature that will be very important in and for the future of WE in terms of serving the community better. |
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In many ways, what more useful that average value or ranking, or popularity (i.e. # of rankings) is who is doing it (I trust a friend or organization recommendation more) and what they say. Still I think both are useful.
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I would love to see this. I think there has been a general hesitation before, because of a fear that rankings could be manipulated. Orgs or people with larger representation and existing support networks could take advantage of these features to pump themselves up. But I think people can "see past" the rankings and know that a ranking system should not always be taken at face-value. Just because an organization or comment receives a lot of support does not mean its necessarily more valuable, but it suggests that it just might be.
Plus, I think the majority of websites or discussion forums that have ranking systems work out well. |
Contributors to this Page
Now this would be a very cool idea, and one way of making the network a feature worth building and worth using.
Implementing it, however, would be pretty big and likely require quite a bit of planning, mapping and storyboarding to see how it would fit in with the WiserEarth architecture. For a project of this scope, it's best consolidate all the ideas into one proposal, which I'm happy to undertake.