Voting

[+fizzymagic]

The biggest problem I see with the whole Waymarking thing is that there will be <Sagan>billions and billions</Sagan> of waymarks in every category.

 

It seems to me that allowing voting on individual waypoints would allow for the best to rise to the top. So if, for example, I was going to New York and was interested in seeing some really cool painted fire hydrants, I could put a filter on my search that would only include those that had sufficiently high scores.

 

Kind of like Slashdot moderation. Waypoint starts out with a score of 0, or perhaps 1 for premium members. Each "up" vote increases the score, each "down" vote decreases the score. Maximum score of +/- 10. I could set my filter to +3 and only see things a signficant number of others have considered worthwhile.

 

Yeah, I know that there is a lot of room for abuse, but I really think that without some decent filtering, the number of uninteresting waypoints will rise to where they choke out the good ones.

Edited August 17, 2005 by fizzymagic

[Jeremy]

There is a rating system available for waymark categories now but some categories have that setting turned off. We decided it was up to the category manager to decide whether they wanted that feature.

 

I always liked the slashdot style moderation. It may be a nice way to mod up some of the more interesting waymarks all around.

[+fizzymagic]

I always liked the slashdot style moderation. It may be a nice way to mod up some of the more interesting waymarks all around.

Hmm.. that's interesting. How about this: No negative votes at all. The score for a waypoint would be the ratio of postive votes divided by the number of visits.

 

Allow a limited number of positive votes per month per member. Or perhaps 1 vote per 10 waypoints visited. Or perhaps have some "karma" feature similar to that used by Slashdot, where constructive behaviors are rewarded with votes.

 

That gets rid of much potential abuse, doesn't make anyone feel picked on, yet lets the cream rise to the top.

Edited August 17, 2005 by fizzymagic

[Jeremy]

I like the idea. I think what will happen is that we'll design all sorts of different scoring mechanisms for categories as we move forward and the category manager can decide which rating system they wish to implement for the category. That way the more appropriate rating feature would apply to that category, or none at all.

Edited August 17, 2005 by Jeremy

[Jeremy]

I'll add, also, that the same goes for rankings of users and general statistics. So that way each category manager can decide whether there should be scoring and ranking or not.

 

Also we have some interesting ideas for motivating people to post new waymarks in your category but they aren't fit for print yet.

[+carleenp]

I can see the utility of ranking waymarks some way or another. It could give some idea of what the best ones are within a category so that when people choose what to visit they have more information. So I also would like something like that.