by Raven Lebeau

Created on: January 17, 2008

I would appreciate an overall "score". I realize the stars are based on number of articles written and being in the top quarter. However, to make an intelligent decision on whether to write a new article or leapfrog an old one, I need more quantitative data. I know you have it stored as a variable. Why not add a line of code that displays it to me?

If I'm in the 75th percentile overall, then I am in danger of losing a star and need to work on leapfrogging some articles. On the other hand, if I am in the 80th percentile, then I think it makes more financial sense to write a new article, being as how Helium has that excellent dollar an article incentive right now.

Yes, I could compute my own average percentile ranking. But I'm not sure how you handle titles with very few articles. Is there some sort of weighting? Or is it just a simple average with the bottom (five percent, was it?) thrown out? Is there a threshold for how many articles a title must have before it counts in your start-determining ranking?

To be honest, even if I had a beautifully written closed formula for computing my average percentile rating, I don't want to have to type in all those numbers! I am prodigiously error prone, so any calculation I do has to be done several times. I would really prefer it if you could just display the numerical value that you have.

You set the "top quarter" standard, and that's fine. Just realize that the more feedback you give your writers, the better they will be able to conform to that standard. I assume you set it as top quarter rather than top five or ten percent because you want a balance of quality and quantity. You want good writers creating new articles instead of endlessly rehashing old ones. Giving us hard numerical values would just help us provide you with that balance.

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