[pmwiki-users] Cookbook Ratings : Vote for the recipes you use

Petko Yotov 5ko at 5ko.fr
Mon Jan 18 07:18:19 CST 2010


On Monday 18 January 2010 10:08:45, Hans wrote :
> Monday, January 18, 2010, 4:30:44 AM, DaveG wrote:
> > Is it possible to have the ratings maintained in the Comments/Talk pages
> > rather than in the main recipe page?
> 
> or on a dedicated rating page?
> 
> As a cookbook page maintainer i need to keep an eye on every page
> edit anyone is doing. I like to keep this work to the minimum.
> Having seperate Talk pages for comments and questions greatly helps
> this. Having ratings added as text edits in the recipe page will
> add a lot of extra work.

But then you'll need to keep an eye on one more page page for every edit 
anyone is doing. :-)

I believe you're overestimating the amount of the "extra" work -- on my 
recipes, where I have asked users to link as examples to their public 
galleries, there have been Zero (0.00) problematic edits since 2006 -- I 
sometimes shothened the entries, but that's not hard, and no user ever 
modified something they shouldn't.

How many problems do we have in PITS, where there are 1100+ pages edited by 
many users adding priorities and comments of practically the same type? Not 
many, and not much "extra" work to deal with these edits too.

> I think only a form based rating system will avoid this problem,

I don't see "omg people can edit wiki pages" as a problem, but as a feature of 
a "wiki" software. And I am definitely against adding complexity if is not 
required and could be avoided.

> or a dedicated rating page for each recipe.

There are a number of benefits for not having the user/rating lists in extra 
pages.
* Maintainers wouldn't have to add *-Ratings pages to their watchlists. :-)
* It is easer to look at the lists of names, instead of going to another page. 
As people outlined before, more important than the numeric sum of the ratings 
is who are the people supporting / endorsing the program.
* It is easier for a visitor to edit the same page, than to go to another one. 
I believe the effort/confusion for a visitor going to a different page for 
longer comments, and to another one for a rating, and finding their way back 
to the recipe, is _more_ than the effort from a PmWiki expert to monitor his 
pages (that is even one page less to monitor per recipe).
* If we keep user lists in the same page, the cookbook category listings will 
need to open half the number of disk files, and this is 2x easier and faster 
for the server/filesystem. Even now, without the additional file reads, the 
server is sometimes slow, I'm not sure I want to add more load to it.


What I wrote above is what I was considering yesterday before enabling the 
ratings the way they are now. But as Hans, Dave and Peter are three of the 
most active recipe maintainers, and all voiced for using a separate page for 
the ratings, I'm very much considering a change. And I agree it should be the 
same for all pages, so should we change it, we should do it quickly.

So, if my arguments are unable to convince you, I'll accept yours. :-) More 
opinions will be welcome though.

Petko



More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list