by C.V.Rajan

Created on: November 22, 2008   Last Updated: February 22, 2010

Quality of articles appearing on Helium has no filtration at the input level. Helium does not subject prospective author-members to any sample writing scrutiny (as Suite101.com does) for acceptance. Helium has virtually no editorial review of articles; what you input is what gets published. This in a way encourages all prospective writers to jump into Helium with enthusiasm and write articles to earn some nominal money.

The only way of ensuring quality of articles is through the Rating system in Helium. Rating, per se, does not eliminate bad quality articles from the scene (unless complaints like plagiarism, off-topic and profanity are found to be true) but they get only down-graded in Helium. Since top-rated articles generally get better readership (when the number of articles are too many) in a way, we can say, articles "rated to be better by peers" are presented more for readership.

Does Rating definitely improve quality in Helium?

By and large, rating system seems to work in that direction. Where there are some "manageable" number of articles (say about 10), the rating system seem to fairly weigh the quality and rank the articles justly in the right order.

But where there are simply too many articles (say above 20), I have frequently seen that rating many times gets skewed. I have personally seen well-written articles some times getting buried below 50th percentile and are unable to raise up unless a leapfrog is done.

Also there are many instances (as frequently reported in Helium discussion boards) that articles poorly written, with grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes and poor sentence structures (particularly if they are shorter in length with comparative articles) somehow get into top slots and stay there for long. Such articles, when viewed by readers can potentially damage the image of Helium as a reliable "knowledge provider".

Another potent issue: Assuming that there are 4 articles in a title and all the 4 happen to be poorly written, then, what really happens in rating is that the "least poor article" gets to the top slot! That's all! There is no mechanism to eliminate poor quality article as such in this system.

Considering all these issues, I have posted several suggestions in the Helium discussion forums to address the issue of quality in Helium. Here are they:

(1) FLAG FOR POOR QUALITY: During rating, Raters should be able to flag an article for "poor quality" or as "sub-standard" (though it may be within the topic and free from spelling

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