[General Battuta]

Sorry, but the same people who say that we don't have enough votes and voters to "properly" use this feature are the same people who say '23 out of 37 people say no, so the idea is definitely worthless'?

Hypocrisy, good to see you again!

You ****ed up your statistics. I will give you a lesson on sampling science now.

Anyone who gives enough of a **** to vote on campaign quality on the wiki is also likely to vote here, which makes this a good metric not only of how large the voter pool is but what they think of it.

That gives this poll a decent **** at being a representative sample of possible wiki voters. It says nothing about whether possible wiki voters is a representative sample of campaign players, which is required for the polls to be diagnostic.

[Black Wolf]

I don't believe the individual campaign authors have particular control over their pages. As a wiki they're open to community editing.

If I went and deleted the reviews section from the WiH page on the basis that they might make people want to play it more than, say, ASW, which doesn't have a review section, you'd (quite rightly), call it vandalism. And so, this:

If someone chooses to put one on their campaign page there's nothing anyone can do about it

except delete it

Would also be vandalism, if the rating bar was added by the creator of the campaign as a legitimate attempt to generate feedback.

Well, you're kind of out of luck.

The poll has a categoric no winning over a qualified no. You're kind of out of luck.

The poll refects community views, which is fine for old campaigns and such, the 'ownership' of which (or at least responsibility for) has essentially been ceded to the community because the original creators left. So a consensus view is appropriate for dealing with them. It's not appropriate to be applied when the individuals or teams who created the campaigns are still around, and can decide for themselves on things like this.

[General Battuta]

If I went and deleted the reviews section from the WiH page on the basis that they might make people want to play it more than, say, ASW, which doesn't have a review section, you'd (quite rightly), call it vandalism.

The addition of a reviews section was requested by the community after discussion. I'm hardly the creator on the WiH page anyway. Adding a reviews page to ASW would absolutely be a good use of time; removing them would contradict what the community seems to have agreed on. If you read the changelog on the WiH page you'll note that I actually went to pains to skew the reviews negative.

Would also be vandalism, if the rating bar was added by the creator of the campaign as a legitimate attempt to generate feedback.

It would no more be vandalism than removing a lengthy blog-style veteran comment by the campaign creator. The community has agreed that blog-style veteran comments are a bad idea. Campaign creators do not, I believe, have any special privilege over their own pages; the wiki is a community effort.

The poll refects community views, which is fine for old campaigns and such, the 'ownership' of which (or at least responsibility for) has essentially been ceded to the community because the original creators left. So a consensus view is appropriate for dealing with them. It's not appropriate to be applied when the individuals or teams who created the campaigns are still around, and can decide for themselves on things like this.

This is an entirely new assertion that I do not believe has precedent. The wiki is, as a wiki, open to editing by all. Will it be split into subdomains?

I don't at the moment recognize any special privilege that campaign creators have over their own wiki pages. This notion feels very much out of left field to me, and more appropriate for a campaign website than a wiki environment. Maybe the ratings bar could go there instead?

Additionally, you've now abandoned the original purpose of the scale, which was to provide diagnostic data to newcomers so they could decide what campaigns to play.

If only a portion of campaigns receive the diagnostic data, the following problem arises:

1. The data is not presented, because it is not available for all campaigns, and is therefore no longer diagnostic of quality.

2. The data is presented, and is taken as diagnostic of quality, in which case campaigns that do not have a ranking are either ignored or recommended as 'unranked' which is as much a slight as 'screening out of competition' or 'racing for completion, no time.'

Just seems like it's not really doing much any more.

[Lucika]

Sorry, but the same people who say that we don't have enough votes and voters to "properly" use this feature are the same people who say '23 out of 37 people say no, so the idea is definitely worthless'?

Hypocrisy, good to see you again!

You ****ed up your statistics. I will give you a lesson on sampling science now.

Anyone who gives enough of a **** to vote on campaign quality on the wiki is also likely to vote here, which makes this a good metric not only of how large the voter pool is but what they think of it.

That gives this poll a decent **** at being a representative sample of possible wiki voters. It says nothing about whether possible wiki voters is a representative sample of campaign players, which is required for the polls to be diagnostic.

While I have my reasons to disagree with your statement above, it is currently totally irrelevant to the fact that you dismiss the idea based on a vote count that you yourself wouldn't consider adequate for rating a campaign.

As for your statement that I have quoted, please take a look at the registrated members count. ~10000. Noting the fact that we've had over one and a half million page downloads just last month, I think saying that 10% of the members are active would be an understatement. For the purposes of illustration, I'll stick with that.

The problem is that you've failed to notice the fact that those who've voted here are those who seriously oppose or support the idea. This is fair to say based on the relatively low amount of votes and the fact that the poll is not that old. This is essentially the same as getting, a few WiH-lovers and WiH-haters together to vote. No one from the middle ground, just them. Obviously those who might not consider the issue we're discussing here important enough to vote in this topic are not necessarily ignoring the chance to fill the opinion on a given campaign.

50 votes - which you would consider acceptable - are ~0.5% of the total member list of HLP, and taking the relatively pessimistic calculation of mine, still only ~5%.

Or you seriously believe that only 129 people wanted to see the Hatsepshut upgraded in almost two years? That would be a laughable claim, and essentially similar to your statement above. Voters about the voting system on the forum are not the same as people who want to vote. Totally different groups.

By the way, unless you are as dirt-conservative and slow as FIFA, you might consider a test run for this. Implement on some of the major campaigns and see the results a month later.

Of course, we can keep on arguing on semantics and statistical details all day until someone closes this topic, but I don't think that this will get us any closer to the goal of solving this issue.

[General Battuta]

While I have my reasons to disagree with your statement above, it is currently totally irrelevant to the fact that you dismiss the idea based on a vote count that you yourself wouldn't consider adequate for rating a campaign.

Again, you've ****ed up your statistics. The sampling population for a campaign is the players of the campaign. The sampling population for a decision about how to vote on the wiki is people who visit the wiki and are likely to vote. That second number is much smaller, and this vote count is probably moving towards significance on it.

The rest of your comments are built on a bad assumption, namely wild guesswork about population sizes, and therefore discardable. Anyone who cares enough to vote on the wiki should, I think, care enough to vote here, and I've done everything possible to promote the poll short of highlighting it. Your suggestions of sampling error are of course relevant; this is not a scientific poll, but it is the best we have, and we cannot reject the null (that it is representative) without tendentious data (which your error hypothesis is not.)

However:

50 votes - which you would consider acceptable - are ~0.5% of the total member list of HLP, and taking the relatively pessimistic calculation of mine, still only ~5%.

Actually, in many populations 5% is vastly more than is required to get a representative sample. Just a cool little statistics tip. However, this does not scale linearly with the population size so it probably doesn't apply here.

The issue is, I think, pretty close to resolved.

[Black Wolf]

If I went and deleted the reviews section from the WiH page on the basis that they might make people want to play it more than, say, ASW, which doesn't have a review section, you'd (quite rightly), call it vandalism.

The addition of a reviews section was requested by the community after discussion. I'm hardly the creator on the WiH page anyway. Adding a reviews page to ASW would absolutely be a good use of time; removing them would contradict what the community seems to have agreed on. If you read the changelog on the WiH page you'll note that I actually went to pains to skew the reviews negative.

I've got no issues with what you (or anyone) did to the WiH page. I like it. It's a good wiki page.

It would no more be vandalism than removing a lengthy blog-style veteran comment by the campaign creator. The community has agreed that blog-style veteran comments are a bad idea. Campaign creators do not, I believe, have any special privilege over their own pages; the wiki is a community effort.

Well, I do believe that creators have special rights over how they put their campaigns up on the wiki - see my Frontlines page for an example. FSWiki isn't wikipaedia, the rules aren't as rigid, and that, IMO, is a good thing.

Additionally, you've now abandoned the original purpose of the scale, which was to provide diagnostic data to newcomers so they could decide what campaigns to play.

If only a portion of campaigns receive the diagnostic data, the following problem arises:

1. The data is not presented, because it is not available for all campaigns, and is therefore no longer diagnostic of quality.

2. The data is presented, and is taken as diagnostic of quality, in which case campaigns that do not have a ranking are either ignored or recommended as 'unranked' which is as much a slight as 'screening out of competition' or 'racing for completion, no time.'

Just seems like it's not really doing much any more.

Yes, the original plan has been abandoned, because the poll seemed to support not utilizing the rating bar in that way. And since not all campaigns will be represented, obviously any kind of ranking would be inappropriate. But for indivdual campaigns who want to put a bar on their page and get a rating for their own campagn, independent of all others, there shouldn't be any problem IMO.

[General Battuta]

I do really like what you've done with Frontlines, it's an excellent piece of work.

And I understand the argument you're making for individual rating bars, but...since in the end it relies on us presenting the newcomer with data and qualifiers anyway, I'm not sure it's enough of a meaningful departure from the status quo to be worth it. And I think short review blurbs a la the WiH page are more useful than numerical data.

You're making headway on me but I'm not sold.

(And if it becomes an issue, I absolutely support edit neutrality. I do not think campaign creators should get special privilege over their pages. But I understand that's not a major point of contention right here.)

Oh and my point above re: the reviews section was to distinguish between a practice the community has endorsed (reviews section) and one they've decided to do away with (long, silly veteran comments).

[Black Wolf]

Well, in shopping hte idea of rating bars around, there's been general consensus that rating bars for individual mods would be good. I also think that - it's what I wanted it for in the first place. My point htough is that once the script is in the wiki, it wont be possible to keep it off campaign pages without a rule that says "You absolutely must not put one of these bars on your campaigns wiki page." And that's not a rule I think we should have on our wiki. We should be encouraging people to make their pages unique and interesting as possible (See Shade's opening post on this thread), and that's made harder with every prohibition and limitation that we put on pages.

[Mobius]

50 votes - which you would consider acceptable - are ~0.5% of the total member list of HLP, and taking the relatively pessimistic calculation of mine, still only ~5%.

Actually, in many populations 5% is vastly more than is required to get a representative sample. Just a cool little statistics tip. However, this does not scale linearly with the population size so it probably doesn't apply here.

The issue is, I think, pretty close to resolved.

Except we're more or less busy working on several projects ---> not an accurate sample.

[General Battuta]

50 votes - which you would consider acceptable - are ~0.5% of the total member list of HLP, and taking the relatively pessimistic calculation of mine, still only ~5%.

Actually, in many populations 5% is vastly more than is required to get a representative sample. Just a cool little statistics tip. However, this does not scale linearly with the population size so it probably doesn't apply here.

The issue is, I think, pretty close to resolved.

Except we're more or less busy working on several projects ---> not an accurate sample.

Is there a language barrier here? What point are you trying to make and how does it relate to what I'm saying? Right in the text you quoted, you can see me saying 'so it probably doesn't apply here'. Was that somehow unclear?

[Mobius]

We need more votes. As I suggested earlier, we need to pimp up this poll to focus everyone's attention on it. I want to know what the players/lurkers (not the developers!) think about the matter because the points of view of those categories may differ.

I hope it's more understandable now.

[TopAce]

Lurkers and casual players will find a simple 1-10 voting range very convenient. Developers would prefer opinions put in words, not numbers. That's the big difference.

[Mobius]

That's why I think a simple voting system should be fine. I strongly believe we must care about those lurkers' opinions, not our own.

[General Battuta]

Votes ranging from 0 to 10 are also a bit inaccurate IMHO, as people tend to give 10s and 0s out the n00bish way without caring too much about the consequences. Any alternatives?

That's why I think a simple voting system should be fine. I strongly believe we must care about those lurkers' opinions, not our own.

You're contradicting yourself.

[Mobius]

I'm not. Isn't 0-100, or Very bad-Excellent equally simple? Isn't that practical enough for lurkers?

Heh, I'd like a 0-15 or 0-30. 0-10 is too common it may end up being misused, while 0-15 at least leads voters to think about what they're really doing.

[General Battuta]

BlackWolf cannot modify the script, so it's out of the question.

[Mobius]

But we can still look for alternatives, right?

[The E]

Even as a simple consumer of games, I find that numeric ratings are misleading and worthless. When I consider buying a game, I make my decisions based on written reviews, not the numeric score that gets pinned on them at the end. Same goes for campaigns.

[Mobius]

That's what you do. It doesn't mean the gaming community as a whole does the same - let me explain why.

As staff member of a site devoted to videogaming, I have access to stats regarding site visits and preferences. I can ensure you that reviews are severely underestimated and underused: people hardly read them and prefer numerical rankings more.

[TopAce]

people hardly read them [reviews] and prefer numerical rankings more.

How do you know?