by Cody Hodge

Created on: March 07, 2009

A very hot topic of debate at Helium is whether or not the system used to rate articles is a fair one. There will never be a totally fair way to perform such a subjective act. The merits of a piece of work are up the individual reader to decide, and to judge based on the values that they impose on an article. As with anything else in life, it would be very hard to put one set of standards on somebody without considering that different people will view the same thing differently.

So is the system fair? Well the system certainly has some good points to it, and I think it usually puts the best articles on the top of the ranking list. There are a couple of things that could be fixed with the system in how it rates specific articles, but overall I think that the system is doing as well as it possibly can.

What I like about the ratings is that everything remains anonymous, and there is no possible bias. What I mean is that you don't see the author, and see that they have five writing stars, and then just go with the writer with more stores. You really have to read the article, and then go with what you think is the better content between the two articles.

However, what I don't like is that you don't really have to read the article to rate it. Sometimes you can just hit a bunch of random buttons, and you can keep your number of rates higher, and then your score can be lower, and you still have more writing stars. For example you can have 599 rates, and as long as your rating is a 71, you still have three stars. However, if you have 200 rates, and you have a score of 71 you will only have one score.

Basically that means that if you can get a general read for enough articles, you can hit on a lower percentage of articles, but if you have more rates you will still have more stars. I understand that you want to cut some slack for those with more rates, but you don't want people to just rate a bunch of articles simply because it will keep the number of stars they have up.

That can put some lower quality articles at a higher ranking then perhaps they deserve. However, I think that the majority of people on this site don't do that, or don't resort to that as the only way they rank articles. If an article is ranked at number one, I have faith that usually it is the best article, or if not, I can always leapfrog, and start the process over again for the whole title.

I believe that the ranking system is a fairly good system. As a reader, I can always judge for myself if an article shouldn't be ranked where it is at, and I can always give a writer feedback if I have any comments for the author. The rankings aren't the sole basis for making money, or getting an article purchased either. As long as the publishers, and other readers can see that the rankings aren't the only way to determine article quality, I believe that the ranking system is a good tool.

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