Forum:Adding a vote extension to articles

Per random discussions, one idea being tossed around is to implement something similar to what we use for voting on WIGOs onto article themselves. The exact implementation hasn't been laid out by anyone, but the basic idea would be to expand a little bit on the up/down vote, offering something along the lines of "needs a lot of work","promising","great article." These are rough classifications with whatever visual element we chose to represent them.

What this "voting" would do would be to allow people who are just randomly reading the article, rather they be long time users or people who merely jumped over from a random blog link or google search to offer us hints about articles and how they might fit into our more specific and general "bronze","silver","gold" rankings. We could not put articles in these categories by virtue of the voting, but merely use the votes as a way to create a list to alert us to articles that are really good, or that are promising, or that even need some work or maybe deletion/merging, without having to rely on random page. tmtoulouse 20:35, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
 * The slider bars might work well for this. Perhaps a thing at the bottom of an article that says "rate this article", there could even be several metrics to rate it on.  Only problem is if it (the article) was poor and then gets better, the old negative votes survive. Perhaps we only implement it on ">= bronze" articles?  02:12, 29 May 2010 (UTC)
 * The idea here is utter simplicity I think, a single click and done kind of thing, its why WIGO is so popular and the same philosophy of digg and all the rest of it. There are several things we could do to deal with changes over time, the most logical might be to weight votes overtime differently. tmtoulouse 02:17, 29 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I was thinking of time weighting, too, like only votes from the last 3-6 months count or something. Better would be to weight the votes relative to changes to the page - if the page hasn't changed, all votes count (obviously).  If the page gets a lot of edits, votes before those edits are deprecated, by a factor of say 4.  Or a factor of the number of the edits somehow?  02:53, 29 May 2010 (UTC)