671766 - Liking / rating system

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Wiki pages, enhancement)

Description

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Provide a rating tool (a "like" button, thumbs up / thumbs down, or similar) with each article to track popularity. The search feature should take these ratings into account when displaying results.

Comment 1

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Jay on Basecamp:
"I do like the idea of 'Like' for content and I believe we have that in our Kuma PRD already... so we can discuss and design how that will work and then figure out where and how that data will be useful in presenting to the users."

Comment 2

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

In a meeting I had with Jay last week, he expressed a special interest in two questions related to this feature:

* What does it mean to like a document vs. like a demo?
* What happens after I like a doc/demo? Where do my liked things show up?

What do we think?

Comment 3

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

like seems to be a universal concept now - the explicit meaning is just basic "I like this"; it's the implicit meaning we can pull from the aggregate data that makes it cool.

I think we could do a box "Because you like X, Y, Z, you might also like P" on a user's dashboard, the way Amazon and Netflix do.

Comment 4

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Hey Luke. Thanks for starting to triage these.

Janet made one more point about this in her note about following:
"I think following and liking are the social concepts that make the most sense for MDN. A person’s activity should generate a feed, which you can follow, much like a following a page or a topic. And you should be able to 'like' any activity (even 'soandso reviewed page blahblah'), as a way of showing appreciation. I think likes should feed reputation, but follows should not (I might follow someone because their work is not always good)."

Comment 5

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

In my user interview with Sheppy, I asked if a user's reputation should affect the weight of his likes. Sheppy made a strong argument that they should not.

Sheppy argued that a person unfamiliar with some content might actually have more valuable opinion on that content than someone who is already familiar with it. A first time reader would be much less likely to "puzzle his way through" problems with the content than an expert would. Similarly, Sheppy argued that someone who is an expert with some content and has good user reputation should not have the final say on its "score" just because of his reputation.

Comment 6

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Marking this as low priority for now. We won't be able to harness the power of our "like" system until we implement bug 671766, which is a huge undertaking.

Thoughts?

Comment 7

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Correction: We won't be able to harness the power of our "like" system until we implement bug 677799.

Comment 9

[Janet Swisher]

Currently, I'm not sure that a generic "Like" is all that useful. Two different variations that would be more meaningful are:

* "Favorite" to add an article to a list of things the user references often.

* "Was this article helpful? Yes/No" -- This is how it's presented on SUMO, and they track how edits affect an article's rating. It's a much more specific question than (implicit) "Do you like this?", which could mean any number of things.

Comment 10

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

(In reply to Janet Swisher from comment #9)
> Currently, I'm not sure that a generic "Like" is all that useful. Two
> different variations that would be more meaningful are:
> 
> * "Favorite" to add an article to a list of things the user references often.
> 
> * "Was this article helpful? Yes/No" -- This is how it's presented on SUMO,
> and they track how edits affect an article's rating. It's a much more
> specific question than (implicit) "Do you like this?", which could mean any
> number of things.

Agreed; I'd much rather see those things.

Comment 11

[Janet Swisher]

Favorites and helpfulness ratings apply to pages, while a karma system applies to users. They're related, but I disagree with the assertion that we won't be able to harness page ratings until we have a user reputation system. We can use either favorites or helpfulness ratings to gauge the quality of a page (as SUMO does), independent of user karma.

Comment 12

[David Bourguignon]

I fully agree with Janet that ratings and reputation systems are two different things. Reputation is very important when there are transactions, less when you are dealing with a fully collaborative process.

Is it possible to simply be inspired by what Wikipedia people did? They introduced a quality assurance system using a simple "Was this article helpful? Yes/No". In addition to providing valuable feedback regarding to the quality of articles, this simple system allows readers to provide explanations regarding their likes/dislikes, such as "the feature X or Y is not well described", "very nice introductory lesson, we want more of this", etc.

This is very important since, as far as I remember, 90% of wiki readers will not be able/willing to edit an article to correct/enhance it... Thanks in advance for your attention!

Comment 13

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

+1 "Was this article helpful?"

Comment 14

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Sounds like we have consensus that we do not need a "Like" system as described. Closing this bug, but if we are still interested in the other features Janet mentioned (favorites, helpfulness) please feel free to collaborate on a specification using the mailing list.