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While Helium's reputation depends on professional-quality writing, Helium's ultimate goal is to have informative, thoughtful articles. Helium's rating system has been devised to find the most valuable and helpful articles and then raise them to the top, while Helium has simultaneously developed a flagging system for notifying writers with otherwise excellent articles that they have a few grammar or spelling mistakes to correct.

This will seem counterintuitive then, but when rating, you should look holistically at the article at all times. The article with flawless grammar and spelling, if not as helpful to the site or as topical to the article title as the other article, shouldn't necessarily be rated higher.

Here is a "Rating Manifesto" that you should keep in mind.

1) Articles on Helium that are more topical deserve to be ranked higher.

Readers will be turned off if they are searching for an article about hot vacation spots in California and instead find an article on raising dogs in California. Even if the latter article is extremely well written, don't rate it higher just because it has objectively superior mechanics.

2) Articles on Helium that are more informative should be ranked higher.

Between two well-written articles that are both on topic, the one that you feel explains more about the subject, or offers more food for thought, should be rated higher. Keep in mind, however, that Helium is not a race to write the most content possible in every article. When you feel that an article is becoming too long to be completely topical, then the length hurts the article.

Those two rules are fine and dandy for articles without grammar, spelling, or formatting errors, but what should you do when articles do have errors?

1) If both articles are equally topical and informative, then articles with poor spelling, grammar, and punctuation should be rated down.

This is the ideal situation of Helium, so to speak. Both articles make you feel good about the site, because you know they promote Helium's knowledge base. However, you also clearly know that one article will convey the information more professionally than the other because it maintains proper writing standards. Feel free, however, to flag the article that has grammar, spelling, or formatting mistakes to notify the author to leapfrog their article to improve it.

2) If an article that is slightly more topical and informative has worse spelling than an article that is slightly less informative or less topic, weigh the benefits against the weaknesses.

This is perhaps the hardest task for a rater. You must decide if the increased informativeness is worth more than the errors in grammar and spelling or the awkward formatting. In any case, you should flag this article with your concerns. If you vote for the article with better grammar and spelling (as long as it has a decent level of topicality and informativeness), don't feel guilty then that you ranked down a slightly more informative article. When the writer leapfrogs the blemished article, then it will have a chance to gain back its rank.

Learn more about this author, Jack Roviere.
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