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the articles gets "read" by Helium members (who are also in a way visitors to the Helium site, who too see the advertisements, and perhaps click a couple of them to bring revenue to Helium) and the authors who get read get their pennies! Thus Helium will get thousands of hither-to ignored "readers cum visitors who happen to be members"!

(3) LET NUMBER OF RATINGS BE RELATED TO NUMBER OF WRITINGS:

One reason why quality suffers in rating is that many writers have no interest in doing rating. With Rewardathon carrot dangling in front of us, every one of us are doing rating actively only now. But once the promotion period ends, I am sure lot of people will take holiday off rating!

So, one thing Helium can do is to make a mandatory condition for rating (or evaluation as I have stated in point number 2) : For every single article that a writer posts, he should rate (or evaluate) at least, say 5 articles. Until and unless this equation is met, no new articles should be accepted by Helium from the author.

(4) OFFER SOME FORM OF MONETARY INCENTIVE FOR RATING:

Make rating too a money making exercise for the writers. Offer monetary incentives by some means. If you do so many ratings, you will earn so many pennies - something of that sort.

(6) THINK OF MORE GRADED RATING SYSTEM:

Let me say, I read one article and I have the following options to rate it:

a) Quality of Content/ Usefulness/ Richness of Information: Poor - Average - Good - Excellent
b) Writing style/ Clarity of thought/ method of presentation: Poor - Average Good - Excellent
c) Quality of English Text (Free from spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, profanity): Poor-Average -Good - excellent.

The marks for excellent is 1; for Good, 0.75; for Average 0.5 and for poor, 0.25

On these categories, add a hidden weightage: let me say, 50% for (a) quality of Content, 25% for (b) writing style and 25% for (c) quality of English.

As per this grading, an article scoring excellent in all will get 100% marks.

An article with Excellent in (a), good in (b) and poor in (c) will get (1.00 x 50%) +( 0.75x25%) + (0.25 x 25%) = 75% marks. (The system will be programmed to do these calculations behind the scene).

The rater shall do this graded rating for both the articles in comparison. With this option in place, he need not really do a selection for "Slightly better" "more" or "By far". Where both the articles get the same graded rating, they are treated to be in par.

(7) ELIMINATE COMPARISON OF "OLD" VERSUS "NEW" OF LEAPFROGGED ARTICLES:

The intention of any author to leapfrog an article normally is to set right minor grammatical mistakes, correct any not-too-glaring factual errors, improve sentence structures, correct typos etc. Sometimes, a more serious re-writing is also done to improve the contents. By leapfrogging, the author expects an improvement in the quality of his writing and also hopes to enhance the article's rank.

Such being the case, I feel there is really no need at all to compare the old and new versions. Once an author leapfrogs, let the article be sent for fresh rating in comparison with an adjacent article straightaway. If it is found better, it going to get promoted stage by stage. If the author has done any mischief (writing some non-sense, deleting the contents etc - for whatever reason!), then the fresh rating will expose it for a demotion in rank or the article would get flagged. Assuming the author has made no perceptible revision at all, even then the exposure to fresh rating will only help maintaining status quo.

Thus by eliminating comparison of the old and new articles, about 10 to 15% of workload in rating can be eliminated.

I hope Helium will look into the suggestions in all earnestness.

Learn more about this author, C.V.Rajan.
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