[Catalog-sig] Please turn off ratings

[Tres Seaver]

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On 04/06/2011 11:33 AM, Brian Jones wrote:
> I think if PyPI had a ratings system that more closely matched some kind of
> (perhaps updated) consensus on what would be "useful", this conversation
> could focus more on what that looks like and who might implement it, which
> would be more constructive IMHO. Attempting to completely eradicate a
> feature by trying to collect anecdotal input doesn't seem like the way to
> go.
> 
> Why don't we start a new thread about what a good ratings system looks like
> and try to get actual consensus from it so real work can get done?


Why don't we take into account the information from Laura Creighton
(relaying from Yelp) that getting reliable value out "crowdsourcing"
requires a significant and ongoing investment of effort.  Given that
information, we might reconsider whether we want to deploy any
half-baked version at all?  I would say that systems which encourage
"drive by" ratings (where ratings do not attach to the reputation of the
person who creates them) are intrinsically broken.

I will propose a radically simpler alternative to ratings:  a simple
"like this package" checkbox might go some way toward countering the
bias in download counts toward packages used in repeated automated
builds.  I would still make the user IDs of those "likes" public, and
would make each user ID a link to a page where *all* a user's "likes"
are displayed.

Note that I don't have any personal negative experience with PyPI's
current ratings:  out of the 240 PyPI projects that I (help) maintain, I
couldn't find a single rating on any most-recent release.  I did find a
solitary 5 rating on the next-most-recent release of one package
(pkginfo 0.7).


Tres.
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Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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